Kelly Poe Wilson

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Before I had children, I didn’t really think about children all that much. Sure, I knew they were out there, and that sometimes they were cute, and sometimes they were not so damn cute, but I pretty much thought about people having kids the same way I thought about people having pet chimpanzees. Some people had them, I suppose (for whatever bizarre reason), but that fact really didn’t affect me all that much. There would be long stretches of days when I would get up in the morning and go to bed at night without ever once having thought about either children or chimpanzees. (At least not until I read that awful story about someone’s pet chimp biting a woman’s face off, at which point chimps were definitely off the table.)

And then I went and had kids myself, and suddenly I started noticing that kids were everywhere. At the park, in the grocery store, running out into traffic—it was like I had been bitten by some radioactive mother spider and my mom-senses had been turned up to 11: not only was I now able to sense when my own kids were about to stick a fork into an uncovered outlet (this actually happens a lot more than you think), but when other kids were as well. I could hear a child crying from all the way across the park and instantly know that it wasn’t an “I-dropped-my-nasty-SpongeBob-popsicle-in-the-even-nastier-wood-chips” cry, but rather a “my-head-is-stuck-in-the-railing” one, and I, along with nearly every other parent in the park, would be off and running.

It didn’t matter if I didn’t know the child. It didn’t matter if I didn’t like the parents. Heck, it didn’t even matter if I didn’t like the child. There is just something about hearing a child in genuine distress that pushes every single one of a parent’s buttons. I’m sure it is biological—evolutionary, even—but knowing that the feeling is coming from deep in my lizard brain doesn’t take the feeling away. If anything, it amplifies it, because “primal” in no way translates to “wrong.”

Which is why I am at an utter loss to explain how any parent can listen to the audio recording of separated children crying in a detention facility and not want to fix this problem immediately. And, correspondingly, not be driven to despair by their inability to do so.

We used to all be in agreement about this. We used to be so horrified at the thought of a single child being separated from their parents that we turned every breakfast into a search party, with face after face staring out at us from the backs of milk cartons as we ate our cereal and drank our coffee.

“Have you seen me?” the milk asked us, and we responded by asking ourselves, “Have I? Have I seen them? What about that kid at the grocery store last week? He looked kind of familiar. Damn, maybe I should have been paying better attention.”

We worried about our ability to recall a face seen briefly in black and white at the breakfast table, and questioned the effectiveness of the whole enterprise, but never once did we ask “Does this child deserve to be found?” Never once did we turn the carton over, looking for answers to questions like, “But what if the parents don’t speak English?” or “What if they didn’t fill out the right paperwork?”

No. We saw the picture and felt the pain, the same way you can feel the effects of an earthquake that happened hundreds of miles away. Or at least I thought we all did. Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe there have always been parents out there who turned the carton to the other side, who could ignore the sound of somebody else’s child in distress. Maybe they have been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for the right moment to let their true callousness out in public.

If that is true then I can’t help but wish that those people had opted for the chimpanzee route instead of the parent one, mostly because I’m afraid that such unfeeling parents can’t help but raise unfeeling children in return. And also because I like to picture those people getting their smug faces bitten right off.

Actually, I like to picture that a whole lot.

On May 26, Parkland survivor David Hogg and his fellow protestors lay down on the floor of a Publix supermarket in Florida in protest of the grocery store chain’s continued financial support of Adam Putnam, a politician who described himself as a “proud NRA sellout.” As the protestors chanted “USA not NRA” from their prone positions, store managers were forced to step around them in order to fetch groceries for the customers who could not maneuver their shopping carts through the sea of bodies. Within the hour, Publix had reversed its decision to support Adam Putnam, and announced that it would no longer make political contributions of any kind.

It’s hard not to be impressed by David Hogg. Even those who sneer at him must acknowledge that they wouldn’t even know who to sneer at if his words and actions hadn’t been so effective at provoking them in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Still, as impressed as I am by David Hogg, I can’t help but be equally impressed by his parents and teachers; because if there is one thing I am sure of it is that while this might have been Mr. Hogg’s first public act of civil disobedience, it was certainly not his first act of disobedience ever. In fact, I am positive that he has been practicing his disobedience for years, and more importantly, I am positive that some very important authority figures in his life have been willing to let him practice his disobedience on them. And for that, I would like to thank them for their sacrifice.

It’s not easy to raise a disobedient child. Oh, sure, it’s easy in theory. It’s easy to tell them stories about Rosa Parks, and Gandhi, and even the American Revolution, but there will come a time when you are teaching them to “stand up to The Man” where you will be confronted with the unwelcome realization that, to them, right now you are The Man. And that if there is ever to be any kind of chance for them to grow up to be the type of people who use reason, critical thinking and logic to stand up for themselves and others, then you are going to need to let them practice those skills somewhere. And unfortunately, the safest place to practice those skills is on you—which can be kind of hard to take at the end of a 12 hour work day.

It’s especially hard because most children don’t start their social justice careers by boycotting Nestle. They start by boycotting bathing, or wearing shoes, or something equally gross and infuriating. And it can be difficult, when faced with a trail of muddy footprints throughout your house, to not revert to the old “because I said so” argument when they question whether your need for them to wear shoes is really just you bowing down to the pressures of a society that is too far removed from nature. (Especially when they make that argument with their muddy feet propped up on the coffee table while playing Skyrim.)

Look, I’m not advocating for all out adolescent revolution: households run by children, with parents too fearful of the backlash to contradict them. That isn’t the way to raise productive citizens, (or even decent room-mates). But I do think that it’s okay—in fact, preferable—to have a child who questions your authority, and sometimes wins, then it is to have a child who is completely biddable. Because the day will come when you won’t be the one doing the bidding, and can you really expect someone to “Just Say No” when all of their lives they’ve been told “Don’t Talk Back”?

Our children’s childhood—if they have good genes, take care of themselves, and are a little bit lucky—will last, at best, only a fifth of their lives. Do we really want to set them up to be the guy who was “just following orders” for the bulk of their existence? I don’t think so. In fact, I think a little parental pain is well worth it if it means you get to be the one who has front row seats to seeing this world being nudged (or shoved) in a better direction.

Muddy feet and all.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”–Maya Angelou

I can’t even remember the first time our senator Sylvia Allen showed us who she was. Was it when she brought up the “fact” that the Earth is only six thousand years old during a senate discussion on uranium mining? Or when she suggested that church attendance should be mandatory? Maybe it was the time she tried to change the rules under which we investigate corrections employees while her son was under investigation for trading cigarettes for oral sex with female inmates? It certainly was much earlier than the time just last week when she gave a “thumbs down” gesture to the people—her constituents—who had filled the senate gallery to watch their senators “at work,” or the time after that when she introduced an amendment to lower the requirements for substitute teachers down to a high school diploma. (It passed, by the way.) No, Sylvia Allen has shown us who she is many, many times. And yet, she’s not the problem.

You are.

If you are reading these words and you are not registered to vote, you are the problem.

If you are registered to vote but your registration is no longer valid because you have moved (even across town), you are the problem.

If you are registered to vote and you choose not to vote because it isn’t convenient, or you forgot, or “it doesn’t matter anyway,” you are the problem.

The last argument is what gets me the most. How can you have watched the events of the last few weeks and still say it doesn’t matter? I know that you watched the teachers of our state—the ones you expect to take a bullet for your child, and who would—break down under the strain of more than a decade’s worth of neglect, and then, somehow, still manage to rise up. (Like Ms. Angelou also most famously said, “But still, like air, I’ll rise.”)

There is an oft-repeated internet meme going around that says, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” The truth, however, is that there are no other people: there are only people, and they are all yours. And these people? Your people? You are hurting them every time you have a chance to change things, and you don’t. And yes, you, personally, do have a chance to change things. Elections much larger than our own have been and will be determined by a handful of votes—in the recent Pennsylvania election the decision of nearly a quarter of a million voters was ultimately decided by a little over six hundred votes. (Of course, those quarter of a million voters made up less than half of the registered voters in the state, so really the election was decided not by the people who showed up to vote, but by the people who essentially cast their vote for “I could not care less.”

Look at it this way: one time, when I was traveling with my then-teenage daughter Clementine, I eventually grew tired of her bored answer of “I don’t care” every time I asked her where she would like to stop to eat. And so I took her to a German restaurant. (Did I mention that she was vegetarian at the time?) The look on her face as she tried to navigate a menu that was 90% sausage was priceless. After that I never had any trouble getting her opinion about where we should stop to eat—oftentimes she offered it before I had even asked.

Hopefully something similar will happen this November with all the voters who heretofore stayed home on election day (or worse yet, didn’t bother to return their could-it-possibly-be-easier mail-in ballot). Hopefully all of those people were paying enough attention these last few weeks to all of the sausage on the menu at our state capitol to finally decide that maybe, just maybe, they do have an opinion after all.

That maybe, after all the times that Sylvia and her pals showed us exactly who they were, it was time for us to show them who we were instead.

And vote them out.

There is nothing that is sweeter to a parent’s ears than the dulcet tones of their child’s laughter. Unfortunately, when you have more than one child, the laughter of one is usually followed or preceded by the crying of the other. (It’s hard to really appreciate the beauty of your child’s laughter when the reason for that laughter is that they are currently looking down at their sibling who has fallen into a well). Recently, however, I got to experience both of my children laughing—nay, chortling with joy—at the same time, and at the same thing. This was probably a first for me in all of my two plus decades of parenting. As such, it should have been a magical moment. It should have been a moment for the long since abandoned baby book. (Book. Singular. No second child in the history of the world has a baby book. Third children are lucky if there is a single photograph in a family album.) So why, then, wasn’t I rejoicing with them at this turn of events, this newfound sibling bond?

Because what they were laughing at was me.

And no, I wasn’t practicing my stand up on them—not that you’d know it from their reaction.

All I did was ask for help with a Google doc and you’d think I was filming an HBO comedy special; apparently, not knowing how to use the latest technology (or whatever—I’m well aware that Google docs are not cutting edge—don’t you start, too) is pure comedy gold. Which is pretty hard to take coming from not one, but two people who didn’t even know how to wipe their own asses when I first met them (and who still, given the amount of snuffling I hear every allergy season, don’t fully comprehend how to blow their own noses.)

But I digress.

The truth is, despite the awful way it came about, I was actually thrilled to hear them finding a common ground—even if that common ground was how uncommonly inept their mother was at technology. This is because, one day, hopefully in the far, far future, they are going to have to be able to find a common ground about me. And while it’d be good for them if they were on speaking terms when that happens, it’d be absolutely great for them if they were on laughing terms as well.

Because while I’d like to believe that the only thing they’ll ever need to discuss in my old age is how I get more awesome every year, and how doctors now think that I will be the first known case of a person living forever, the more realistic part of me knows that this isn’t going to happen. One day they’re going to have to come together to make some difficult decisions, and it would be nice if they were at least able to tell some funny stories in the middle of it all.

Even if most of those stories happen to revolve around my complete inability to use Google docs.

Last week a picture of my son, Clyde, appeared in our local paper: he was marching beside his fellow students in our town’s version of the international March For Our Lives rally. Under the online version of that picture, in the comments section (which yes, I read, because I am apparently a glutton for punishment) there was a sneering two word dismissal of all that my son and his friends were trying to accomplish: “Indoctrination complete.”

At first this comment enraged me (as it was no doubt intended to), instantly setting spark to all my Mama Bear instincts to protectdefenddestroy. By the time the next March came around (this time to demand better pay for our teachers), and Clyde was once again “manning the barricades,” I had calmed down enough to be able to realize that the commenter (Alexei or Vladislav—I can’t quite remember his name) was actually right: Clyde’s indoctrination was (almost) complete. He now understood what exactly was required of him as a citizen in a democracy. (I say “almost” because at sixteen he still can’t complete the final and most important step—voting.)

The word “democracy” literally means “rule of the people.” That means us. That means him. That means all of you. That means that the people who are out marching in the streets are not disrupting the status quo—they are the status quo. Something our elected representatives occasionally need to have pointed out to them.

This is not a new thing. This is not something that the Millennials, or Gen Z, or even those old hippies came up with—this is how it was always meant to work. After all, one of our first national protests happened in Boston in 1773. And they have been happening ever since.

In the history of this country, and this world, and this existence, we have only ever gotten what we wanted by demanding it. From women’s suffrage in 1920, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the Supreme Court declaring that states must allow same sex marriage in 2015, all of these victories came after years of “the people” reminding the government what the status quo currently is.

Looking back in review, history always seems inevitable, as if there was never any doubt as to how things would turn out. But to the women attending the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 woman’s suffrage was far from inevitable, as was universal suffrage to the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s. And surely the men and women at Stonewall in 1969—who were really only protesting for the right to be left alone—could never have foreseen a time when they would be allowed to legally marry.

Some people look at the time lines listed above and only see the years, the decades between the start of a movement and its victories and give up before they even try. Others look at those timelines the same way a farmer looks at the saplings they have just planted and sees their grandchildren happily feasting on the fruits of their labors. It’s all a matter of perspective—and it makes me indescribably happy that Clyde has chosen to adopt the perspective of the latter.

Because even though the “arc of the moral universe” may “bend toward justice,” it oftentimes doesn’t just bend on its own. And like that same farmer shaping their trees into better producers, sometimes we have to help things along by making it clear, through patience, persistence, and judicious applications of force, which direction that bend should take.

Patience. Persistence. Moral resolve. Co-operation. What better “indoctrination” could a mother ask for?

When I was younger, the only way to get from Flagstaff to Phoenix if you didn’t have a car was to take the Greyhound. For reasons I can’t quite remember, taking this bus always seemed to necessitate me hanging out at the Phoenix Greyhound station for what seemed like hours, waiting for either the bus to take me back to Flagstaff or for one of my parents to get off work and come pick me up in at the Phoenix end. In retrospect it was probably all just bad planning on my part, but in my defense we didn’t have a little thing called the internet back then (or at least I didn’t), and so the bus schedule was always something of a mystery to me.

The first few times this happened I stayed in the bus station, because downtown Phoenix back then was not only scary, but also really boring. There were no street performers, no trendy bars, no cute little tapas restaurants. There weren’t even any sports arenas (yeah, I’m that old.) All there really was was guys in suits working in offices twenty floors up, and, as I discovered once the boredom won out over the fear, two kinds of shops: porn and pawn.

Which is how one day I came to be standing in front of a rack of magazines with names like “Lactating Nurses” and “Edward Penis Hands.”

Yeah, I could have gone to the pawn shop instead, but really: who doesn’t like browsing a book store? Or rather, browsing the “stacks” (heh) had been my plan: I hadn’t been in there for more than five minutes before I was told that I had to leave. When I asked what I had done it was gruffly explained to me that it wasn’t what I had done, but rather who I was. The store clerk’s exact words were, “Girls shouldn’t be looking at any of this.” I tried to point out to him that from what I’d seen so far all of his products featured “girls” (in fact, some of his products featured nothing but women), but my arguments fell upon deaf ears, and so out I went. Which was fine—the pawn shop ended up having way cooler stuff to look at anyway. But I was still a little bit put out at having been booted in the first place, especially for such a ludicrous reason as the one I was given.

Even now, thirty years later, it seems ridiculous to me that this man was trying to protect me, a “girl,” from finding out that there were, in fact, girls in the porn industry. Although, in retrospect I’m inclined to think that what he was actually trying to protect was himself; he was trying to protect himself from the embarrassment of potentially having to face my questions about what, exactly, kind of business he was running.

I think of that porn salesman every time I hear someone make a similar argument about “protecting” young girls (it’s always girls, isn’t it?) from frank discussions about porn stars, or rape, or sex work (and especially about the ways the three often collide). “I don’t want my daughter to see that,” they say, or, if they’re being unknowingly honest, “I don’t want to have to explain that to my daughter.” Because what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to have to explain to my daughter that this world treats some women—not you, honey, never you—as if they are things instead of people. And I really don’t want to have to explain to her why I haven’t done one single thing in my life to try and change that.”

Including, it would seem, having the discussion in the first place.

[This column was inspired by local artist Drayla Vanrachack. Drayla’s artwork was denied space at a recent local exhibition because the owner of the space “didn’t want to have to explain it to his daughter.” You can find—and buy—Drayla’s art on Drayla’s facebook page.]

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When my children were little, one of the things I struggled to teach them was the idea of cause and effect. Specifically, the idea that when they were the agents of cause, there could be no one other then themselves to blame for the following effect. Leave your favorite toy outside when it rains? You have no one but yourself to blame when it gets wet. It doesn’t matter that you successfully left it outside a hundred times before without it getting rained upon; the lack of rain did not serve as some sort of nonverbal de facto contract between you and the sky whereupon the party of the first part (you) have the clear and inviolate agreement of the party of the second part (the sky) not to let water fall upon your favorite toy.

This also applies to the issue of pretending to “ clean” your room by shoving everything—dirty dishes, clean clothes, (presumably) dead hornets nests, permission slips, one shoe out of every pair of shoes you own—under the bed. Just because your dad never looked under the bed when checking your “work” doesn’t give you some sort of eminent domain over the space underneath the bed, making it a legally grey area where you can hide your assets as if in some sort of tax haven. When you have created a sufficient enough sized disaster in your room that even I notice it, you are the one who needs to clean it. Cause, and effect. In reality, unlike the law, there are no loopholes. The rain (or Mom) is not going to let you off on a technicality.

This notion, that “getting away” with something is the same as getting permission to do it, is, I think, at the very heart of the current backlash against the #metoo movement. As more and more unwelcome behavior is being called out, more and more of the people who previously were “getting away” with those behaviors are reacting with shock and dismay. (“What? It’s not okay to pressure a woman into having sex? Next thing you’ll tell me it’s not okay to hug women who don’t want to be hugged—what?”)

People who complain that “all of the rules are changing now” are ignoring the fact that the rules have not changed; it’s just that they were never playing by the rules in the first place. Rain falling out of the sky isn’t new—the fact that this is the first time it landed on your favorite toy is.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering: ignorance is not an acceptable excuse either. Even putting aside the legal fact that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the truth is that you were never ignorant in the first place. Are you really going to make “I didn’t realize there was such a thing as rain” the centerpiece of your argument? Or even, “I didn’t know you didn’t want me to put bowls of soup under my bed; you should have told me you didn’t like it.”

Look, no one likes to be called out on bad behavior: the first instinct for everyone, from toddlers all the way up to Presidents and Popes, is to deny, deflect, and defend. I have no idea what the evolutionary purpose behind that kind of reaction is, but nevertheless it seems to be hard wired into our DNA.

So we get it. You got called out for doing something wrong, and now you’d just like for the whole thing to go away. And you’d really like for the rest of us to stop talking about it. Well, we’d like that, too; however, we can’t stop talking about it until you understand that getting caught was never the problem: it was the doing all along. Tired of having your dirty laundry pulled out from under the bed (both literally and figuratively), and the subsequent lectures/tweetstorms that follow? You know the solution.

Stop the cause, and we’ll stop the effect.

The other day I was at the grocery store when I got a text from my husband asking me to pick up some fresh thyme for a new soup he was making. As per usual in my Flagstaff shopping experience, the store I was at had several fresh herbs on hand—none of which were thyme. I called my husband to ask if he wanted me to pick up a jar of dried thyme instead, and he said yes, because the stuff we had at home was “really, really old.” It was simple, really: an everyday problem and an everyday solution. Nothing especially frustrating about it. At least there wasn’t until I got home and tried to put the new jar of thyme away: where I wanted to put it there was already a jar of—apparently unusable—thyme in its place.

“What’s this doing here?” I asked.

“That’s the old thyme,” he replied.

“I can see that,” I continued. “But why is it here, and not in the trash?”

“Because it’s yours.”

After a few minutes of puzzled questioning on my part I found out that, apparently, since I was the one who had first brought jars of herbs and spices into our home almost a quarter of a century ago, all future heirs to those original jars now and forever more fall under my purview, to be purchased and disposed of as I see fit.

Unbeknownst to me, they were a part of my dowry. One I had never even realized I possessed.

Upon further reflection, however, the idea of me bringing a secret dowry (secret to me, that is) explained quite a lot about the dynamics in our house. Suddenly I understood that the reason certain household chores always seemed to fall to me and me alone wasn’t because, as I previously believed, my husband was incapable of performing them, but rather because he was just abiding by the terms of the contract. One I had never seen. Or agreed to. It was, essentially, the same deal as the one between the Queen of England and the swans of London: they all belong to her, whether she wants them or not. Although, in my case, instead of swans I get sixteen-year old bottles of fennel seeds.

And dryer lint.

Yes, dryer lint, because apparently I am the only one in the house allowed to remove it from the lint trap. (This even though we didn’t even own a dryer for the first five years of our marriage—obviously my secret dowry also included future possessions as well). Now normally this would not be an issue—even I am not so petty as to be above touching lint—but on those occasions when I am out of town for a few weeks it can get downright dangerous, not to mention frustrating when the lint cache is so full it takes two hands and bracing both feet to manage to get it out of the dryer upon my return.

The same can be said for the dumpster I need just to haul away the junk mail that piles up in my absence, as well as the very impressive collection of empty toothpaste tubes we would own if it weren’t for my diligence in actually throwing them away.

I’d say that this was a simple case of hoarding—of someone being unable to throw absolutely anything away—if it weren’t for the perfectly good vacuum that managed to find its way out to the curb for bulk pick up. (“I didn’t think we were using it anymore.” Apparently WE had never used it—it was something that also only lived in my sphere.)

I’m sure that there are also things in our house that I never do, or at least never do correctly. (In fact, I am sure that there is an entire list somewhere—and that loading the dishwasher is on there.) And I’m also pretty sure that one day the unluckiest one of us will have to find out exactly what the other’s list entails.

But until then: can I interest anyone out there in some lovely aged fennel lint salad? Maybe we can trade for a (partially) used vacuum cleaner.

I know that my son, Clyde, has not always appreciated having a budding social justice warrior for an older sister. I’m sure he didn’t fully appreciate having her come home from working her shift at Pride in the Pines when he was twelve and making him listen to her “sexuality is a spectrum” speech. And no eleven-year-old boy is ever really ready for his sister to casually mention that “virginity is just a social construct.” But the day that probably stands out the most in his mind is the time when he was nine and she burst into his room demanding he answer the question, “Can drunk girls consent?” And then, when he didn’t answer her quickly enough, answered the question herself with a sharp, “No, they can not.” Nor did he probably appreciate the lecture that followed when she explained to him that consent must always contain the following three elements: “continual, verbal, and enthusiastic.” At nine I’m pretty sure he was more interested in catching up on the latest Naruto release then in learning the finer points of navigating sexuality in a world of vastly unequal power dynamics.

Now, however, at the wise old age of sixteen, when such things are much more relevant, I’m sure he feels a little less mortified, and a lot more grateful. (Well, to be honest, probably no less mortified, and only a little more grateful.) But still, there must be some degree of gratitude there, if only for helping him thus far avoid any of the scandals that have befallen pretty much every celebrity ever, with the possible exception, of course, of Tom Hanks. (Please, don’t ever let me hear anything bad about Tom Hanks.)

Of course, I’d like to believe that Clyde (or any boy, really) has always been the type of person who already understands everything his sister once insisted he learn, with special emphasis placed on the importance of consent, but recent scandals would seem to insist otherwise. Apparently, there are some men (yes, I know: #notallmen) who seem to be under the impression that the “nuances” of consent are not, in fact, something simple enough to explain to a nine-year-old boy, but are rather some form of advanced math, a complicated story problem involving clothing, and alcohol, and buyer’s remorse. The truth of the matter is that consent is not even long division level of hard; it’s simple addition. You+ continual, verbal, and enthusiastic=consent.

This is so easy to understand, and so commonly accepted that Lenny Bruce worked it into his stand up act sixty years ago. (“You never touch it” he complains to his wife, who replies “Do you really want me to touch it if I don’t want to touch it?” When he answers her with a desperate “Yes!” the audience laughs. They laugh because, even back then, they knew what he was asking of her was wrong.)

Lenny (and Lenny’s wife, and Lenny’s audience) all understood what Louis C.K. and others seem to have forgotten, or pretend not to have known in the first place: not only does an absence of “no” does not mean “yes,” but a “yeah, I guess” doesn’t mean “yes” either. Because, really, the most important part of the consent trinity is enthusiastic. Without enthusiasm there is no consent. (And if you are so socially inept that you legitimately can’t tell the difference between enthusiastic and grudging, then it is probably in the public’s best interest not to let you wander freely about without some kind of an aide.)

We can’t all be lucky enough to have an older sister who firmly believes (rightfully so) that “the birds and the bees” should be updated to include “and asking nicely, please.” But, just maybe, we can all make up for lost time by channelling our own budding social justice warriors and explaining consent to the boys in our lives. Even if they would rather get caught up on the latest Naruto release.

Before we knew anything about the driver of the car that careered down a New York city bike path, before we knew any of the details about the shooting in Las Vegas, before we had more than snippets of information about the massacre of half of the congregation at a small Texas church, we all instinctively knew one thing about the assailant: it was a man.

Think about it: as shocked as you were when you first heard the news, how much more shocked would you have been to find out that the perpetrator was a woman? That’s because, in nearly 100% of seemingly “random” acts of violence, the perpetrator is a man. An angry, violent, man. And this—this, is what scares me the most about all of these attacks. It scares me because this is the part of the equation that I actually have the ability to do something about, and I’m terrified that I’m going to somehow mess it up.

I can accept the fact that there is no way for me to control many of the terrible fates that could potentially befall me or the people I love. Random acts of violence are just that—random—and I can no more determine when and where the the next one will strike than I could determine where the next meteor will fall. And so, by that logic, there is nothing to be gained by worrying about them.

However, as the mother of a son, I can try and control the other half of the equation. I can’t do anything to ensure that I or someone I love won’t one day be faced with an individual who is so broken and angry they want to hurt everyone around them. But I can do a lot towards making sure that I don’t help create that very same broken individual myself.

It is a sad fact of our society that the only emotion many boys are allowed to feel is anger. Not sadness, not fear, not disappointment, not anxiety—every expression of these “weaker” emotions is met with the command to “man up,” or “stop being a little pussy.” And so we create these sad, inchoate creatures who have been denied the opportunity to really understand what it means to be human. We talk about Millennials who have never learned “how to adult,” while ignoring the much larger problem of our neighbors and coworkers who have never learned “how to human.”

Look, I’m not trying to pull a Trump here and say that this isn’t a gun problem. It is clear to anyone with even a slight understanding of math that less guns would equal less carnage, in the same way that if we were suddenly able to purchase personal nuclear weapons at Walmart the body count would start to go way up. But there’s no reason that it can’t be both an anger and a gun problem, in the same way that someone can be both drunk and stupid. And so, what I’m suggesting is that we try and work on both problems at once. Outside of the home let’s work on electing people who understand that, unlike lobbyists, numbers never lie, and inside the home let’s work on helping our tender-hearted, sensitive boys stay that way.

Although perhaps “work” is the wrong term for what we must do, because that implies that there is something wrong with our boys that we need to fix, when the truth is that there is something right with them that we need to stop breaking. Just like our little girls, our little boys are born ready to love and be loved in return. Compassion and kindness is their factory setting; all that is required of us is to not change it, and to speak up when others (coaches, teachers, older relatives) try and change it themselves.

It might not fix the entire world, but it will at least fix the part of it that is still within our grasp. And who knows? It’s entirely possible that that just might be enough.