Our Children: Discarded, Disdained, and Destroyed

IT IS THE END OF YET ANOTHER DAY on which children were shot and killed in a school in the United States. Last year, there were 330 shootings in elementary or secondary schools: in a 36-week school year, someone fired or threatened to fire a firearm in a place where children are sent to learn in safety more than nine times a week. Today, it was Minneapolis.

Flags have been ordered to be at half-mast for a few days by Donald Trump. Numerous thoughts and prayers will be sent, perhaps massaged by artificial intelligence to find a fitting tone. Some will call for the vigorous prosecution of the troubled people who have put a phrase once oxymoronic, now redundant, into our daily lexicon. Perhaps more useful measures—passing meaningful gun control legislation, or placing restrictions on political spending by a gun lobby whose legal rights and protections have grown while those of human beings shrink—will be given lip service before swiftly fading away yet again.

Of course, being injured and traumatized or killed at school is not the only catastrophic failure of care children experience in the United States. In a country of extraordinary wealth, 14 million children are experiencing hunger, and the number of children who are unhoused increased by 33% between 2023 and 2024. Fourth-grade literacy rates are staggeringly low. Across several major indicators in the areas of physical, mental, and developmental health, the well-being of US children deteriorated significantly between 2007 and 2022, leading a distinguished professor of pediatrics to declare “a growing health crisis” demanding “urgent national attention.” Nearly half of LGBTQ children report being bullied, increasing their risk for attempting suicide; more than half of transgender teens have lost access to the care that they, their medical providers, and their parents deem necessary. Unsurprisingly, children whose parents are targeted in ICE raids show symptoms of PTSD. The policies of the United States cause dire