This land

Mondays and other days

This semester, the girls and I have a routine we call Monday Funday. Every Monday afternoon, I first pick up Harriet from her pre-K classroom. We walk around to the other side of the school and wait for the blue steel doors to open, signalling the end of the day for the elementary school kids. Bea joins us, we walk to the car, and I drive us to McDonald’s, where we get vanilla soft serve ice cream cones. After that, we go to a park with a zip line, swings, and a treehouse, where we play for a while. At 4:15 or so we head to Ms. Shelley’s house. Ms. Shelley is their music teacher, who started a children’s chorus that she teaches in the sunroom at her house. Chorus is only 45 minutes, so most of the parents just wait outside or in their cars while the children sing. The theme this spring is “places,” so we listen to renditions of “Welcome to New York,” “NYC,” “California Dreamin’,” “This Land is Your Land,” and, for some reason, “YMCA.”

I love chorus because it’s just about the joy of singing together. That’s it. No practice on your own (though the girls sing a lot), no final performance, no competition. Just once a week instruction and song with a fun and talented teacher.

This Monday, I heard about the latest school shooting not long before the girls went in to chorus. Three nine year old children and three staff members who wouldn’t get whatever joyful or ordinary routines the looked forward to on a Monday afternoon, whose loved ones faced what President Biden called “a family’s worst nightmare.”

Richard and I have been able to keep news of school shootings from our girls, quickly snapping off the radio whenever talk turns to the violence our leaders refuse to deal with. I hate knowing that they will one day be indoctrinated to this reality, the way that my college students are. Just yesterday, as my students were working on their research-driven essays—which range in topics from rapture anxiety to the emerging popularity of Japanese City Pop—someone paused to ask, “Anyone here from Wake Forest? There’s a report of active shooters at the community college.” That turned out to be a false alarm, but we are awash in alarm, and for good reason.

This week the North Carolina Republican-controlled legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that will make all of us less safe. The law makes it easier to buy a pistol, with no permit or sheriff’s department oversight required, and makes it possible for concealed carry permit holders to bring guns into schools that also double as places of worship. This week NC Republicans also introduced a bill outlawing all abortions except when the mother’s life is in danger or in the case of an ectopic pregnancy. The bill defines pregnancy as the moment an egg is fertilized.

This is the state we’re raising our daughters in. I know other people—in Tennessee, in Idaho, in Florida, in Alabama and Texas—face the same, and related, terrors. Yet when Richard sent a text suggesting we make a five-year plan of exit, for the sake of the kids, I got angry.

Because I love it here. I love our daughters’ school and teachers beyond measure. I love the long list of animals we’ve seen along the Haw. I love our neighbors. I love my job at a public university, even as we’re under attack by a Republican legislature that calls a law criminalizing health care the “human life protection act” while at the same time voting to invite concealed weapons into schools and churches.

In this damaged and now-more-dangerous state, I still love sitting in my car on a spring afternoon, listening to a group of girls singing about “N-Y-C” or how fun it is to stay at the Y or how this land was made for you and me. I don’t want to leave or get chased out of here (and I don’t really know where we would go). I know Richard doesn’t either—this is his land too!

There are things we can do, even as it feels like nothing can be done.

1. Call your representative and ask them to support the Office of Gun Violence Prevention Act (H.R.1699 / S.951 and the Assault Weapons Ban.

2. Join and donate to Moms Demand Action. Volunteer if you can.

3. Vote in every election and work to canvass early with groups like Neighbors on Call or Down Home. Down Home volunteers and staff worked on Medicaid expansion in NC and now 600,000 more people will have health care coverage in our state. Celebrate the wins.

4. Go to your local school board meetings, sign up to speak, and tell the board about your concerns. I’m planning to do this for the first time on April 3, and the moms’ group I’m part of, One Chatham, has been taking turns speaking in support of teachers and funding for our public schools. (Bea has been working on her own opinion piece about public school funding, which maybe she’ll let me share.) I’ll let you know how it goes.

5. Sing when you can. Learn some new songs with friends. Or listen to birdsong, whalesong, frogsong.

Love to all of you, Frog Troublers. We are headed to visit Uncle Skipper at the beach this weekend and are looking forward to time with cousins and dogs. How about you?