What initially started as a gun control debate spiraled into small-town politics, an inept police force, cover-ups, traumatized families, and a search for answers.
That’s not new. Something like it happened in Parkland, but the granular details were often overlooked because that school shooting had taken on such a key political role for the gun-control lobby and because local and national authorities who were complicit in the mess tended to be Democrats.
The video leak, like so much else, has only fed into the broken discourse over what happened in Uvalde. And we know what happened.
The drive to militarize local police forces expected small departments to operate at a scale beyond their expertise. Local politics can be every bit as corrupt as the national kind. But the media’s drive to score points introduces its own form of corrupt narratives. Pile on the conspiracy theorists who show up to insist that nothing happened and the dead kids are actors and the whole thing reaches a critical mass of general horribleness.
At the bottom of this is institutional failure and institutional corruption.
When people can’t trust institutions and institutions aren’t worthy of trust, there’s no real way forward. Narratives turn into talking points and cheap shots.
And then this happens
Uvalde police officer criticized for checking his phone was waiting to hear from his dying wife – Texas Tribune
The truth? Not the truth? People can be forgiven for wondering. And that’s what happens when trust falls apart. Trust is what binds communities, families, and countries together. Without it, there’s no way forward.
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