Uvalde School Massacre, Men Of Wood.
On May 24, 2022, we all watched a tragedy unfold in real-time. It was in the city of Uvalde, Texas at the Robb Elementary School. 21 people would die that day, 19 children and two adults. There’s no reason for me to go over a lot of details about that particular massacre. Attached to this post is a detailed report put out by the Texas House of Representatives titled;
Investigative Committee On The Robb Elementary Shooting dated July 17th, 2022. Also, there is an article put out by NBCDFW Channel 5 News, written by Jamie Stengle and Jake Bleiberg on July 20th, 2022 titled, Timeline: Uvalde Shooting Minute by Minute
But here are a few facts that sum up the situation.
At 11:32 am, the shooter fires outside the school, cited by school surveillance and an officer tells the committee that he believed he was being shot at. He asks for permission to shoot who he believes is the shooter, but he is not given permission.
At 11:33 am the shooter enters the school and begins shooting. The shooter spends 2 ½ minutes firing over 100 rounds inside two classrooms.
At 11:35 am three officers enter the school through the same door as the shooter.
For 1 hour and 14 minutes, the world watches as men with guns linger in the hallway under the sounds of dying children.
At 12:50 pm, officers enter the classroom and kill the shooter.
This failure was not an issue of training. It was not an issue with the equipment. This failure cannot be blamed on the stupidity of command. This failure was not the product of current police policies. You could simply label this failure as cowardice, but Cowards have been among us since the beginning of time. What the world saw was something much worse.
This was a failure of mankind.
This massacre exposed a disease that has grown and has been spreading through our men for a couple of generations. We watched armed men who, once they saw the working end of the shooter’s AR-15, were not willing to risk their lives for the lives of our children. My God,,,,where have our men gone?
A few days ago I stopped by the post office to send a package. I noticed an elderly man in the post office parking lot sitting on the rear of his vehicle with the back hatch open. It was very hot that day. I thought that maybe he had car problems and he was waiting on help to arrive. I walked over to him and said, hello. He had no car problems and was a tourist from Panama visiting some friends in town. He said that he was just taking a little break from the heat.
His name was Carlos and he was 81 years old. We began to talk about the heat, the gas prices and of course my grandfather, who I like to talk about.
Carlos told me, “When I was a child my father had a saying, “ They used to make men of steel and ships of wood, now they make men of wood and ships of steel.”
Carlos’s father was right.
I don’t think that I have ever quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before, but in a speech in Detroit on June 23rd, 1963 Dr. King said this;
“There are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
The wooden men in the hallway of Robb Elementary on May 24th, 2022 showed the world that there is nothing they are willing to die for. May those wooden men live forever with the sounds of the dying children in their ears.
