A Nation Gone Wild

These past few weeks, another school shooting. This time in Minneapolis. Another headline. Another list of names. Another chorus of grief echoing through classrooms, families, and communities. Innocent children, gone — not by accident, not by illness, but by the hands of other children.

How did we get here? How did we become a nation where the sound of gunfire inside a school is no longer unthinkable, but familiar? Where parents drop their kids off each morning with a knot in their stomach, silently praying today won’t be the day their child doesn’t come home?

The pain I feel is more than sadness — it’s a breaking. A tearing at the soul of who we are supposed to be. America is supposed to be a place where children grow, dream, learn, and laugh. Instead, too often, it’s where they bleed.

We are watching a generation of children raise themselves in the shadows of absent parenting, fractured families, and a culture that numbs instead of nurtures. Kids are carrying weapons instead of backpacks, anger instead of guidance, despair instead of hope. Somewhere along the way, we stopped holding them accountable, stopped teaching them right from wrong, stopped protecting their innocence.

And yet, it’s not just “their” problem. It’s ours. We all live in this nation gone wild. We all carry responsibility for the world we’ve created — a world where violence grows faster than compassion, where loneliness outweighs belonging, where we are quicker to argue about laws than to reach for our children’s hearts.

I can’t stop picturing those parents in Minneapolis. Mothers and fathers who will never again hear the sound of their child’s laughter echoing down the hallway. Parents who will carry birthdays that never come, graduations that never happen, weddings that will never take place. The ripple of that loss will never end.

And for what? For nothing but pain.

When I look at Tim and the struggles we face day to day, I often feel like our little world is overwhelming enough. But then I lift my head and see the bigger world — a world that is supposed to care for its children, but is instead losing them in classrooms, playgrounds, and street corners — and I wonder: what hope is left?

Maybe hope begins small. Maybe it begins with each of us deciding that “enough” really means enough. Enough ignoring the cries for help from our young people. Enough pretending that violence is normal. Enough turning our heads while children kill children.

We need to remember what it means to be present parents, present neighbors, present human beings. We need to teach again, to listen again, to hold boundaries again, to tell our children that their lives — and the lives of others — matter deeply.

I ache for the parents who are burying their children this week. I ache for the children who are growing up numb, carrying weapons like they’re just another school supply. And I ache for all of us, because a nation that cannot protect its children is a nation lost.

But I don’t want to give up. I can’t. Because even in a nation gone wild, there is still love. There are still families praying for peace. There are still parents trying with everything they have to guide their kids toward light instead of darkness.

We cannot bring back the children already gone. But we can fight for the ones still here. We can look at this brokenness and choose not to accept it as normal. We can grieve — and then act.

For the children of Minneapolis. For all our children.