The Children Sing
Quick, where's the Kleenex box? It was a hard week. It began, as so many hard weeks have in this chaotic era, with a news story: a white nationalist, the kind who are the most rabid believers in the Trump agenda, only this one was even more extreme than they are, took his Trump-empowered bigotry and part of his NRA-empowered gun collection into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven people. I saw that in my news feed Friday after school, and coupled with the other horrible things that no-longer fringy conservative white men had done that week (pipe bombs, shooting elderly African-American grocery shoppers when a prayer meeting proved inaccessible), I started the weekend in a bad place. All these crimes hit close to home one way or another: the bombs being sent to people of any prominence at all who'd been critical of Trump (making me thankful my blog reaches dozens, rather than thousands, of people); the attempted assault on a church much like the one where I pl