Fear of the NRA

the interview with him, I was thoroughly depressed. Not because I find Jonathan depressing, but because I'm just wondering how many times we're going to be talking about the same things, and recognizing that the only thing that our politicians are offering us as we experience multiple pandemics, as we are forced to live through trauma, and all that they offer thoughts and prayers. Today's conversation with Jonathan is about the fact that this week in Michigan, once again, multiple schools

across the state are closed. Multiple middle schools and elementary schools are closed. Why is that because of copycat threats of gun violence, of massacres taking place at these schools,

and so they've shut down. Now, what's funny to me is that these are the same people who, if the school was shutting down because of COVID, would be flipping out, turning over deaths at school board meetings because their children are forced to wear a mask and that is traumatizing, you know, to protect them from a virus that is killed over eight hundred thousand Americans. At this point. The area that Oxford High School is in, Jonathan Will tell us later in the show, is the reddest of red States.

You're talking about gun country, USA, And there's a petition right now out in order to make the schools go virtual until the new year. And I'm thinking to myself, that's just kicking the can down the road. What happens in the new year. We also thought that, you know, we wouldn't see any mass shootings. Are here of them during twenty twenty? Will it comes to come to find out, according to the New York Times, is that there was over six hundred mass shootings that took place in twenty twenty.

It was just that the news which is too busy covering the other pandemic being COVID nineteen that was ravaging our country, as opposed to the fact that, you know, gun purchases were at a record high in twenty twenty in this country. That gun stores were made to be essential, right, so we need toilet paper Purerell Clorox wipes and a nine millimeter. But that is America and what is troubling me today so much is the trauma that is being inflicted on the nation's children, and no one seems to

give a fuck. I want us to think about today, if you have kids, if you don't have kids, think about yourself when you were in middle school and high school during your most vulnerable time. Hormones are changing your figuring out who you are, how you fit in was enough anxiety? Right? We often watch movies and read, you know, young adult novels on teen angst. We'll think about what we're actually putting teens through in the twenty first century. Where we don't do fire drills anymore, we do active

shooter drills. Where we're not sending our kids to school with regular backpacks. Some of them are going to school with bulletproof backpacks. Where we're requiring student athletes to turn into some type of superhero to protect their classmates and lose their life in the process. Where we're shutting down

schools because of threats of copycat violence. But then once we get the AOK, we're sending those kids back and telling them what the coast is clear, everything is safe, and then we expect them to be able to take in their normal curriculum and just act as if all is okay. You know, one of the things about this new century is that we've had more open conversation about

mental health. I mean, just think about what we saw over the summer with the Summer Olympics and Simone Biles talking about mental health and saying that she's taking herself out of competition because her mind isn't together. We saw that with Naomi Osaka. We've seen that with other athletes like Michael Phelps talking about depression and anxiety right and

now being an ambassador for therapy and mental health. But we're not having that same conversation about what happens to a generation generations at this point since Columbine of children that no no other reality. While according to US News and World Report, suicide attempts among teenagers are up damn near fifty percent in this country, you would think that that would be something that we would all regards of party, regardless of geographic origin, would be rallying around. Except we

have turned our children into political pawns and footballs. You have the GOP tweeting out during the Scotus hearings on abortion on the abortion case in Mississippi, that they are pro life and they are the pro life party, where when you have the Lauren Boberts of the world and

others posing with their children with ar fifteens. Meanwhile, for the first time, we're seeing the parents of Ethan Crumbly be charged with four counts of manslaughter each for the fact that they just left a loaded weapon in their house with the child that they knew wasn't fucking right.

But they made jokes much in the same way that Lauren Bobert had a big fucking smile on her face while her children are holding guns that are bigger than they are, just a week after a mass shooting at a high school that claimed the lives of four goddamn kids. But that shit is normal. Wrap your mind around what it would have looked like if one of the black members of Congress, one of the latinxt members of Congress, we're posing with ar fifteens in front of their religious symbols.

It would look like, righte some type of recruiter video. It would look like some type of cult like shit. That's what we would say, because we only criminalize and penalize and question the pathology of people of color in this country, But we don't talk about the pathology of white violence in this country and how it is not only tolerated, but fucking celebrated. That was a goddamn member of Chris She has no business being one, because she's

about as smart as a fucking empty bucket. But at the end of the day, the outrage was mild, just like the outrage is tepid in response to what it is that we are asking our nation's children to participate in day after day. You know, I gotta think that during quarantine during twenty twenty, when the majority of the nation's schools were closed, that some parents were breathing a

sense of relief. And why would that be, well, because they don't have to look at their phone and worry about the breaking news and wondering if the next shooting was coming to a neighborhood and a school near by them, because that's the kind of trauma that parents and caregivers deal with as well. We don't give a fuck about kids in this country, and that is obvious because in one of the wealthiest nations, as we love to say it, over and over again. Child poverty and hunger is at

an all time fucking high. That we're sending kids to school and teaching them how to evade predators rather than taking away the weapons that predators use. I am so sick to death of hearing where public opinion is. And you'll hear me with the conversation with Jonathan. Does it matter anymore? Seventy percent of the public is against this and ninety percent of the public is for x Y and c our politicians don't give a fuck about where public sentiment lies. If they did, we would have had

gun protection laws in Columbine, right. It wouldn't have taken over twenty years of mass shootings, the martyring of a classroom of elementary school children, and still no goddamn action. We don't care about kids. We show more outrage for teaching Tony Morrison in school. We show more outrage for teaching them about the truth of the founding of this nation, which doesn't even fucking happen in K through twelve. Then we do about the fact that we are traumatizing generations

of children with gun violence. You know, these kids. When I was reading the report about the increase in suicide attempts, particularly among young girls, and I'm thinking to myself, how is this happening? Why is this happening? And I thought about in the early aughts when there was a spat of high profiled suicides of lgbt Q plus a youth that were being bullied in schools, and the response to

that was celebrities to create a campaign. The Trevor Project helped created this campaign, It gets Better, right to be a campaign of positivity from adult LGBTQ people who are saying, you can get through this tough time, you will make it through to the other side, that there is another side. And I keep thinking about that campaign now because I think there is no way to tell children, all children, regardless of their orientation or gender identity, that it gets better.

This is why they are a suicide. These kids are looking around and the anxiety that they have, the PTSD, that they have adults who are supposed to be in charge, not adulting and definitely not taking charge of any of the major issues that they are going to be inheriting young people that have absolutely no power and no say in the direction that this country takes and are just sider it literally sitting ducks and they're looking around and

they're saying, does it get better? Because what I'm seeing is that things are getting tremendously fucking worse. Where do we point to and tell them, oh, when you're an adult and you're in charge, you know things will be better then, or my hope is with the youth, it's not.

We are giving them a country and a planet that is ravaged by client I'm a change right that is so aggressive, so aggressive right now that for the last two fucking years, we've had more century once in a century, historic storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, than ever before, but we take no action on it. We have racial uprisings, white supremas arming themselves, shooting people in the street and walking around free afterwards, not convicted, but we're telling them, no,

you're safe, things will be good. We have gun drills in elementary schools and we're telling kids, don't worry. This is the greatest nation in the world. How how is it the greatest nation in the world when we are back to book burning. That's our defiance and not looking at what is really going on with our kids and

how we really should be protecting them. I am sick to death, sick to death, and honestly, I must say that parents have got to be some of the most hopeful people on the planet, because I, for one, couldn't imagine what it is like to be bringing children into the world right now, to be rearing them in the hopes that they inherit something better. When you know, good, God, damn well, the amount of anxiety and stress you have right now about how rapidly our country is declining. It

is a disgrace where we are. It is a pure, pure disgrace. This should be a bipartisan issue. We should care about the future generations. But every single act or inaction that we make tells us where we care, tells us where we are. I'm worried, folks. I am so

scared for the future. And I can't imagine what it's like to be ten eleven, to be a teenager when you should have little care in the world right you should be playing and having fun and exploring, and instead you're learning how to barricade yourself in your classroom, you learn how to do army crawls on your school grounds. This is America, this is who we are, and this is nothing to pound on your chest. And be proud of.

We should be ashamed every single one of us. Coming up next is my conversation with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. Folks, you know that when we have our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel join us on Woke Wednesdays, we unpack so much the thing that is troubling me Jonathan, as it does each and every week, but particularly this week is America's obsession with guns. It's been what has it been over a week maybe two weeks at this point since the shooting at Oxford, Michigan

High School. And again there are several schools, middle schools in particular, that are out this week because of threats of copycat gun violence. And we're thinking that this shit is totally normal, that it's completely normal that we would tell our middle schoolers that, oh, there's you're not home from school because of snow, You're not home from school because of you know, a teacher workday. You're home from school because there's a threat that somebody's going to come

in and shoot it up. And so whenever that threat is lived in, I want you to feel comfortable going back into school. And that's the norm that we have allowed our kids to become accustomed to what are your thoughts on where we are right now? And that I think that is this the first time that we're seeing this kind of level of copycat threats because I don't remember post other school shootings neighboring schools being shut down because of a consistent perceived threat. Well, there's a ton

to unpack there. I mean, first, in terms of the Oxford schools, the you know, the horrible, tragic irony is that, of course the masterings themselves are copycat phenomenon very often. That's why for a while there they stopped publishing the name of the shooter. They stopped publicizing it was a kind of unsuccessful attempt to say, if we don't glorify

these shooters, maybe they won't there won't be copycats. But that wasn't a very successful strategy for a bunch of reasons, largely because social media is there and you're not going to be able to stop it anyway, but also because you know, it's it's really just the horrific nature of

the crime more than the name of the shooter. And especially now it's such a tense moment, there's so much anger, so much frustration, and so many darn guns around, um, and and so in a way, it's just a very volatile moment, and so the you know, I don't think people who study this are very prized by the by the copycat. We've seen this a lot. The you know, the weird thing in Oxford is now there's a petition going around because there are so many threats, and there

are threats toward middle schoolers, threats toward kindergarten. I mean, it's really sick stuff, um, that there's a big petition going around in Oxford to have school be all virtual until after January, until the beginning of January m basically saying, man, we don't know what what threat is real and people of course feel so traumatized and so vulnerable. But it's just ironic because you know, this is like rural wide

America gun country. I guarantee you if they said there's a petition to go virtual because of the covid um stuff that that that people would say, oh, forget it, man, we'll bring our kids back into school. But it's really it's interesting that that the gun, the gun issue, fear of guns is now having people there support the idea of having kids not go into school. So you know it, it just shows you that we're having kind of overlapping

pandemics in a way right now, you know it. It's so disturbing to me that I mean, one, I just you know, Jonathan, for the first time in a while, right when I'm seeing the fact that these schools are still are closed or are closing, and that the threats are middle schoolers and and elementary school children, right, which

is hearkening back to Newtown? Right, And you know the fact that I recognize then that if we're going to do nothing about classrooms of first and kindergarteners and first graders being mowed down by an AAR fifteen, if we didn't do anything about gun violence, then um, we're not going to do anything. And so here we now fast forward. How many years has it been. It's been what five or six years since since Newtown happened at the kind

of towards the end of the Obama presidency. And you know, I am I'm at a loss for the fact that these parents will protest your kids not wearing a mask because they think that that's going to traumatize them. You're going to traumatize my child. It's child abuse, to have them wear a mask in school all day to protect them against a virus that is killed now over eight

hundred thousand Americans. Right, But there's no protest for the fact that I don't want my kids to have to go to school under duress and post traumatic stress disorder and the threat of violence because one of their classmates or not one of their classmates, just like an armed shooter rolls up into the school. There's no protest there,

there's no outrage. So tell me more about this petition and if it has any real legs in the way that let's say, you know, protecting our children from a Pulletzer Prize winner like Tony Morrison, the late Tony Morrison garnered a petition. I mean honestly, when I started reading about that, so I felt bad for kids. You know, kids are getting kids are being used as as political pawns right now and in all these different ways, and

the issues are real. I mean, imagine being a kid just during the pandemic with COVID and all that stuff that's scary and dangerous enough, and then all of these debates about what does it mean to be in school and all these politics. So my first thought when I saw the petition was, man, just you know, we need to do a better job with our kids right now. And I haven't really gone into detail about how how much how much this petition is going to make a difference,

so it'll see. It was just reported literally just before we recorded this segment today, so we'll have to see what happens. But it is just it just made me think, like how vulnerable people are right now in a way, And again, this is an area, this is a part of Michigan where there are an awful lot of guns, and people would not be thinking in any critical way

about the threat that guns posed. But again I think I think it just shows you that when a mass shooting impacts your community, or your kids school, or your environment, just how much that can change to a profound sense

of vulnerability. So we'll have to see what happens. I do think it's important to note that this case against the parents is a pretty important case, and so if something comes out of this horrible tragedy, I mean, we've been trying this for a very long time, but if something comes out of this that suggests that parents are responsible for the armed actions of their children, that would actually be a step forward, because we've failed in that

regards lots of different times and so and so, you know, we'll have to see what happens. So the parents are expected back in court this week and each of them are facing I think four counts of manslaughter for the four students that were murdered in cold blood by Ethan Crumbly. And you know, I look at the videos of the parents. I read the text messages between Ethan Crumbly and his mother.

Don't get caught l ol about looking up ammunition as he's sitting in the classroom, and you know, and everyone clutching their pearls in the mainstream media, how could these parents? How could these parents? And then last week Congresswoman Lauren Bobert post a picture with four of her children with guns that are bigger than they are, in front of a Christmas tree. And so how is it that we look to the Crumbles and say, these people are deranged?

How could they buy a gun for their child? And you have a sitting member of Congress that is posing a week after yeah, well actually there were two. There was the congressman from Kentucky I think posted like two days after with his whole family with a R fifteens also, And so I mean I've been tracking this, as you know, for quite some time, and the just the horrible bad taste.

So there were actually two two congress people who posted family pictures with guns right afterwards, and Bobert's was a response to another congressman from Kentucky who also had posted with with semi automatic weapons for his family. And so on one hand, it's horrible and cruel and bad taste and just horrible timing. It shows just how tone deaf and you know, for a lot of people out of

touch that these that this is. But it's also representative of the logic in many parts of America where no matter the trauma or the effect, the answer always is more guns. And this idea of you know, you're not going to take the guns away from me. Guns represent my freedom and liberty, all these kinds of things. And so it's a performance that is meant that The Atlantic had a good piece on this. It's a performs that's meant to stir liberal outrage and liberal fear about the

irrationality of this. Now again, Oxford School District in Michigan is very far from a liberal progressive multicultural school district. This is red state Michigan in a certain kind of way. And so the people that they were trolling were you know, you would think their own their own people in a way. But it does show about this role of like, you know, this debate. We often get into this tug of war after mass shootings where it's like, oh, we need more

gun control. Oh you're not going to pry my guns out of my hands. Let me show you how important my gun is. All this kind of thing. So it's a kind of performance that happens after these and again the people who are caught in the middle are kids in schools and victims and families. And so I don't know when I saw that. When I saw that this Bobert and the other thing, I just thought, you know, God, it's just the cruelty is just imaginable. Yeah, it's so

you know, it's so disgusting. And I wonder, I wonder, Jonathan, if if these parents, right, they've already been charged, if they are actually convicted, if this is going to really change anything, right, Because you know, Michigan, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Michigan is a state that doesn't have, you know, laws around how you're supposed to lock up your firearms, right, so you can leave it on the kitchen table, you can you know, put it in a in the side table in your bedroom,

and and that's your prerogative and right. And I'm just like, how is it that doing the fucking bare minimum right locking your gun up the very bare minimum, maybe leaving it unloaded, putting the gun in one place to ammunition in another, and having them both under lock and key, Like, how is that not something that is just law? I feel very strongly that this is actually something that people agree on, but it's just like the Capitol riot, people

can't admit in public that they actually agree. And so we learned this week, for example, that Fox News was mortified, horrified of the January sixth insurrection, but they couldn't admit it publicly. Even Sean Hannity was, you know, terrified, but he couldn't say it publicly. And in a way that's similar to these kind of common sense laws. And why

do I say that. I say that because I've got a lot of on the ground experience trying to help pass legislation in this regard, and I've seen what happened. We had a bill in Tennessee about ten years ago called mcayley's Law. What happened was, I think a seven or eight year old kid had picked up at his parents, I think his father's firearm which was just left laying around the house, gotten an argument with another kid, and shot and killed like an eight year old girl, I

think eight or nine year old girl. And people were mortified. It was a very similar story to what we're seeing here. And people started saying, how could who's responsible here? How could a father just leave an AAR fifteen loaded and unlocked laying around for a kid to pick up and then shoot another kid. And obviously that it was a murder, but also the shooter is, you know, ruined for life,

the families ruined for life. And so the issue was let's make parents responsible for storing their guns, and in our case, it had complete bipartisan support. The day before the bill, there was a hearing and everybody's like, man, this is you know, I don't care where you stand, this is exactly what we need. In that night, the NA flew in. It was like um, you know, um

air con one or something. A whole blaneload full of lobbyists who showed up in the you know, the courthouse before and started saying, if you're going to vote against, if you're going to vote for any kind of gun legislation, we're going to make sure you never get elected or

hold up public office again. And people got scared. And the day the vote was held, only Democrats voted to support this gun safe ledge safety legislation, and all the Republicans change their vote and voted against it because of fear of the NRA. So this fear of public intimidation, lost humiliation, career ending, which is exactly what Trump plays on. Also with all this other stuff, is something that is it's like a short circuit in our democracy in a

particular way. People can't say what they mean. And again, the reason I say that is because I really do feel like there's a tremendous amount of public support for guns, for kind of common sense guns storage laws. It's just that given the political wins, there's a cost for people who will say so publicly. So, Jonathan, doesn't matter that

the public actually cares. Now, doesn't matter that we continue to say, you know, seventy seven percent or ninety percent of the public you know, is for X, Y, and Z when it doesn't sway any of the politicians. So if we don't give a damn about where the public falls anymore, pretty much on any issue, we could we could be having the same conversation about abortion right And again, these are the same people, And so I appreciate you saying earlier like there is an overlap here. There's a

then diagram to be putting up right now. If we'd no longer give a damn about the public's opinion and where they fall, then how do we fight Well, the Republicans have done this very well. But first is that the power for all of this is in the judiciary. And you're exactly right. Seventy eight Americans support background checks, closing loopholes on the sale of guns at places like

gun shows and online. There's broad public support for this, but you can't move the needle even a millimeter because of the power of elected officials and judges who are not willing to go anywhere with this. And the Republicans, as we've talked about a lot on this show, have basically stacked the judiciary with I mean, ultimately, gun policy is made at the judiciary level also, and there are judges who are just about finishing high school right now

who have lifetime appointments. There was one judge I think in Mississippi who's thirty five years old, had never held any kind of any kind of elected office or anything like that. His only position was that he was an unflinching Second Amendment supporter. So we've got across the country judges in positions with lifetime appointments that are going to last for quite some time. And so the Republicans have

played the long game. They saw that the power of all this stuff is in the judiciary and none of this is going to matter unless the Democrats have a counter strategy for getting judges in place who are not zealots about this issue and other issues. You know, it's funny because yesterday I was looking, you know, in Twitter, on Twitter, and I am seeing a tweet of congratulations that this year the Biden administration appointed ten federal judges. And I said, ten federal judges in a year, And

you guys are posting that like that, that's celebratory. I said, how many judges was Donald Trump putting up a week? Right? How many? How many were how many were they appointing a week, you're talking about ten in a year. If we're working at that pace, we ain't getting anywhere, right,

It's not going to get any easier. And everybody's now saying, oh, McConnell has powers threatened, And I'm like, McConnell's superfluous, just like the terra superfluous at this point, Like they have these judges in their thirties appointed in courts all across the country. Their agenda is going to be playing out

for decades in a way. And so I just think that the day one of this administration, they should have had a federalist Society style list of judges that we're going to counter all the crazy judges that were in place. And I agree with you completely completely that this, among other failures of this administration, has been a failure or also of the Democrats to come together. I mean, this

should have been from day one, from day one. So yeah, you know, so I had pulled up an article the New York Times, as you know, tracks using the Gun Violence Archive, they track mass shootings, right, and you know, there is there's very little consensus, as they say, on the definition of what a mass shooting is Some say that it's for more people injured or killed. Others say

it's you know, it's two or more. But regardless of this, I wanted to bring up something because we've talked about this before that while in twenty twenty, you know, we're in quarantine and we're dealing with the COVID nineteen virus, you had said Americans bought more guns in twenty twenty than they had ever before. And the other thing that was that was said, according to gun violence Archives, is that there was more than six hundred shootings in twenty

twenty and that we just warrant covering them. The news just wasn't covering the mass shootings in the way that they had before because we had this other crisis and pandemic that we're covering. And so when you look at these numbers, they said, to compare twenty nineteen, where there were four hundred and seventeen shootings to twenty twenty, when we're in a pandemic and there are six hundred shootings. And then to some extent, they're saying that, you know,

there have been countless mass shootings in twenty twenty one. Jonathan, is it me or is everything trending upwards, and and and what do you what are some of the theories that you have to help us understand why we're trending upwards at this particular time. Well, one truism that we've seen for decades is that the more guns, the more more guns, mean more shootings. That's just kind of the way this thing works out. When there are fewer guns,

there are fewer shootings. It's shouldn't be rocket science. Unfortunately, that's a very controversial position. And so what have we seen over the course of the pandemic. We have seen the biggest rise in gun sales in the history of the planet. In a certain kind of way, that was an issue before the pandemic. Even before the pandemic, Americans owned three hundred and ninety three million guns. You might

do the math. That's more than people. So there was like one point two one gun per people in the country. Not that every person had a gun, but so we were already the most armed civilian populace in the globe, on the globe, and then the pandemic. The first couple of months of the pandemic, there was this rush making guns.

Gun stores essential businesses. People were buying guns the way they were buying purell and toilet paper, and so we just have an ungodly amount of guns in circulation in this country, and so it's not surprising that what follows is shootings, different kinds of shootings. With the massings get all the headlines, but the kinds of shootings that happen when people have guns in their homes are guns suicides

and partner violence, shootings and other kinds of shootings. And so the more guns that are in people's homes, particularly during a moment of tension and when people are staying at home or social distancing or homeschooling their kids, you're just going to see the kind of result that we've had now, which is an unfettered, just orgy of gun sales into homes, a lot of them that had never had guns before, a lot of tension, ideological social anxiety, unrest,

political and ideological divisiveness, and crappy gun laws. And so it's really a kind of perfect storm. And I think probably next year's even unfortunately, going to be even worse. And until we kind of can come together on this, along with coming together and everything else, I think this

is what we're going to see. But again, That's why I was saying the NRAY is so superfluous because they've already got permiss of judges and more guns than people in the country, and so what else they have to do at this point except for armed both sides of a civil war, And so that really it's a it's a scary moment, and guns just heighten heightened the risk

for everybody. With a few minutes that we have left, Jonathan, I want to circle back to something that you just said about suicides, because this is this is something else that I don't think is getting a lot of attention right now, which is, you know, a study had come out and USA US News had reported it over the summer, and then again it was picked up recently that the suicide attempt rate among teenagers has increased by almost half,

particularly for teenage girls. Emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen increased twenty six percent over the summer of twenty twenty and fifth the percent this winter, right the winter that we are currently in US Center for Disease and Control and Prevention has found right, and they're saying that this

is another pandemic. And again I want to tie this back to the trauma that we are placing on children in this country, whether it is you know them watching adults right say, don't wear a mask. Wear a mask, you're you know you're not a patriot if you wear a mask, to ushering kids into schools to do mass shooting drills, active shooting drills instead of fire drills like

you and I did when we were in school. What do you what do you think when you see reports like this and hear about studies like this, and like, why aren't we talking about this as a major crisis around our kids? You would think saving our kids would

be something we could come together around. Instead. Everything we've talked about here, the debate about guns, the debate about the role of history and when does history begin, the debate about what we teach and how they think, is all happening in the context of just a tsunami of despair. Because kids in school right now don't know what the future is going to look like. There's climate instability, the pandemic is raging. The grown ups are not in control

right now. There's no certainty about the future of the economy or the world they're going to enter into, and so we've made kids political pawns at precisely the moment that kids are the most vulnerable. I see this even with the college students I teach, and it's such a

national failure. It's just such a national failure. And really, I think that taking these ideological battles and then making kids the places where these ideological battles are being fought is going to lead to horrific, horrific consequences for kids, but also a host of unattended consequences just for the country that we can't even envision. And so really, I really hope that if we if we address even one pandemic, that this is the one that we that we focus on.

You know, I just it is. It is amazing to me that, you know, a decade, two decades ago, the Republicans referred to themselves as the Party of family values. That you know, two decades ago it was, uh, you know, we care about life. The Twitter handle at GOP tweeted during the abortion hearing at the Supreme Court, we are the pro life party. We care about life, life above all else. And I'm saying to myself, where where is that true? I mean, I of course agree with you.

I mean all these fights, I mean, all the critical race theory stuff, the sixteen nine stuff. It's it's kind of making an example. But I also think that polarization itself has taught sick for kids in a way. And so yeah, I don't know, I don't know where we

go from here. I mean, I think that the despair among kids is something that this country is going to be, even if the pandemic was solved tomorrow, even if all these problems were solved tomorrow, even if we could somehow magically glue the ice shelf back into place before it falls off into the ocean, kids are just the level of uncertainty, trauma, despair, just about who's in control, what's the world going to be like five years from now, which all these things that are causing grown ups to

have anxiety, kids are suffering in space. I again again, I teach college. I see kids, you know, they're kids to me very regularly, and I can just say that the level of uncertainty right now is just off the charts, and in a way, it's a reflection of our dysfunctional political system more than anything else. Yeah, And I you know, and I would just end with this is that what

hurt would pains me the most. Unlike your college students, right, who have the ability to vote, right, they have the ability to actively participate in in our society, in our in our politics, these young kids, these middle schoolers, these high schoolers, it's like being trapped in a cage and watching everything burn around you and not having the ability

to open up the door and escape. Yeah, and I and I and I literally just don't you know, just don't think that we are collectively thinking about what the long term ramifications of that level of despair and trauma really is. I mean, let's think about the how could politics constructively address the future of mental health for kids. I think that would be a very important political intervention in a way. So, um, and you mentioned voting, but I mean, a lot of college students right now, look

just look at the politics of voting. It's not like they see that as like a panacea in a way. And so in a way, we really need to rebuild faith in trust in those institutions. And you would think that would be something people could come together about, but that ain't happening quite yet. Oh, Jonathan, I just you know, I don't know. I do not know, I do not know. You know, I liked it when I thought that it was COVID nineteen that was our biggest fucking problem. But

it's not. We are living inside of a of a perfect storm. We appreciate you as always being one of our many trusted guides to get us through. We'll talk again, God willing next week. No, we'll have a cheerful We'll do cheerful holidays next week. You know some things. Maybe that is it for me today. Dear friends on woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power. Get woke and stay woke as

fun and friends. Do take good, good care of yourselves, please, because your wellness is what is going to have you survive whatever this is that we are living in. See you soon,