Covenant school: I’ve been there. I either performed a puppet show about recycling for Nashville Beautification there, or I promoted that show. Either way this Green Hills area school is among many I performed at, or at least promoted, over the 10 plus years most of my performances moved to mostly Nashville as my tour life slowed down.
    Thousands of children, teachers, staff line Hillsboro Road, and every single one I performed at, sometimes for the full 10 plus years of more local performances, was a great school
    At 10:13, 3/27/23, the police received an active shooter call as reported by Don Aaron, someone I worked with years before that at WSM as a news person. I was in programming.
    More murdered children, and a rather unusual addition to this horror: a dead female shooter.
    This keeps happening. In the past 10 years senseless shootings, or supposedly senseless, have multiplied exponentially. Sometimes they make too much sense because increasingly we don’t know how to get along with each other, how to react. But if you think some anti-gun rant will follow, you’re absolutely wrong.
    I have written about this so many times. The same dead end answers come left and right. Most gun regs are questionable, only because Pandora’s Box has been open for hundreds of years in this country. But more guns solve nothing because of an insistence that gun owners don’t have to, kids don’t have to, go through safety classes and training. If someone plans on never touching a gun basic safety is still important, like if one never plans on owning a car knowing to look both ways, being proactive about watching traffic, cars backing up, is important. Both are here, whether we plan on owning either, or not.
    The NRA had a great class when I was a kid. I would like to see something like that in all schools, only expanded. Our country has guns in it. They’re not going away. Because of that we have to know how to deal with both from an early age.
    How we handle our anger issues is so different from when I was a kid. Left, right, Christian, Atheist, whatever, we have people making stupid excuses like “prayer in school” for the shooters. Prayer left in schools in the early 60’s when I was very young. A 50 year or more delayed reaction? Really?
    To me suggestions like this are mere distractions, sometimes perhaps intentional.
    It used to be parents of all types had a COVENANT of sorts that children had expectations they must meet, adults too. And adults were expected to work together. That covenant is mostly gone, it seems. Like if I got in trouble with Dell, my best friend, we would expect a call from teachers, principals, police… maybe all of them, though we were never that bad.
    But there’s something else. Children are like mirrors and these acts often a reflection of society. Baseball bats aimed at a prosecutor’s head, a coconut made into the bloody head of a president as “comedy,” having to be dragged out of a private business over a mask rule then coming back shooting, threats if someone is held responsible for anything. Suggestions to slam the head of the accused into a cop car after they’re arrested and jokes about hammering the head of a politician’s husband, should have no place in society. Adults should be lined up against the act OR the joke. Just like severed presidential coconut head. THEY ARE ALL WRONG. Talk show hosts, news-based programming: it has become acceptable for supposed adults to talk like this, suggest violence, make thoughtless, inappropriate, accusations and jokes as if brains have been pre-lobotomized of any sense of right and wrong.
    Doesn’t help that much of the partisan-based media is teaching us to hate each other, view those we disagree with as “animals,” less than human, worthy of being put down figuratively… that far too often turns literal.
    Adults nationwide should be joined against these things, whether it be burning buildings during a protest, or beating cops with flag poles, or threating to hang a VP.
    Trying to distract by pointing at others should have no place in these discussions. No cherry picking peaceful moments in an attempt to try to disseminate disinformation, as if either were perfectly peaceful. It’s like cherry picking peaceful moments on a playground when a bully is beating the hell out of another kid just for fun. NOT THE POINT.
    To me these things should be part of a natural, obvious, covenant between ALL adults. But we no longer have that covenant we used to have when I was a kid that just seemed to come natural. The covenant that our differences didn’t matter more than raising kids right, or even behaving like adults.
    We need it back.

                          -30-

    “Inspection” is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 50 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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