What if it was your kid?

What would you do?

I don't know what to write, but I don't want to write nothing because that feels even worse.

I feel numb and I feel angry that I’m numb because being numb is part of the problem.

I feel helpless and I feel angry that I’m helpless because that is part of the problem.

It hits different once you’re a parent. I can feel it now, deep in my stomach, the sorrow, the emptiness, the senselessness of what it would feel like if my son my baby my little guy was killed for no fucking reason at school.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN MY LITTLE BUBBA

It could be your son.

It could be your daughter.

Your sister your mother your friend someone you barely know. It just was and it will be again.

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times .

We have to act as though it were our kids. All of us. There’s no other way, I don’t think, to stop it. If the entire nation assumed that their kids had just been shot, something would be done.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars after 9/11 to make sure it never happened again. It was a near impossible task - to check everyone who flew on a plane in and out of America - but we managed to pull it off. And yes you could say the TSA was largely ineffective theater, but the money was spent and something was done. Why can’t that be done here?

I hate how cliché all of this sounds. That's another sick paradox of all this - the more it happens, the less shocking it becomes. A new normal? Fuck that.

I am angry and then what? What do I do? What do any of us do? I could donate, yes, but what else? What are the actionable steps to take? And how do we organize the collective outrage about these shootings in a way that lasts?

I refuse to believe that nothing can be done because that means giving up on this country and I can't do that. Not yet.

But I don’t believe that politicians will do shit without being forced to. So how do we force them to do something?

Imagine you saw your child’s name on this list below. How far down would it be until you found them, their full name and their nickname and their age - 9 years old. 10 years old. What would you do if that happened? How would you spend the rest of your days?

What if we all acted as if it was our child? What would happen then?

What do we do? What happens next? There has to be something.

Genuinely please reply and let me know.

Names of Those Killed in Uvalde TX

• Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, 10

• Alithia Ramirez, 10

• Amerie Jo Garza, 10

• Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10

• Eliahana Cruz Torres, 10

• Eliana “Ellie” Garcia, 9

• Eva Mireles, 44

• Irma Garcia

• Jackie Cazares, 10

• Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10

• Jayce Luevanos, 10

• Jose Flores, 10

• Layla Salazar, 10

• Makenna Lee Elrod, 10

• Maite Rodriguez

• Miranda Mathis, 11

• Nevaeh Bravo

• Rojelio Torres, 10

• Tess Marie Mata

• Uziyah Garcia, 10

• Xavier Lopez, 10