Who burns and who builds. Thoughts on rage, erasure, and the people who will rebuild.

America lost the plot when we kept the guns and buried the children. The country became fluent in thoughts and prayers and illiterate in protection. If your politics require dead children with grief as the main script, your politics are wrong.

I continue to speak out and resist in the way I do because collapse is not a plan in my view. The people who cheer the fire rarely bring a hammer. They do not have the patience, empathy, or public spirit it takes to build anything worth keeping. I do not fault anyone who chooses to leave or return home to survive. Survival is holy. But some of us will stay. We will lay new foundations with humility and steadiness and raise something that finally matches the ideals printed on this country’s banners.

This is not a debate about rights. It is a ledger of costs. We run an outrage economy that treats dead children as acceptable loss. That is not freedom. It is moral insolvency.

I knew America had fully slipped into its villain era when performative Christians began tagging trucks, tees, hats, and even their skin with “Don’t Tread on Me” after school shootings. Our babies were murdered, and we were told to pray and carry on. Make that make sense. NRA and Second Amendment absolutists keep telling us the cost of freedom is the blood of our children. They treat that as acceptable, along with industries that profit from fear and market it as virtue. That is not civic courage. That is the worship of grievance.

Not all believers are part of that machine. The faithful who try to live the Sermon on the Mount are in my foxhole. They bandage. They feed. They show up.

Mothers run the crisis drills. Teachers write the sub plans that read like wills. Communities pass the baskets and organize the meal trains. The state offloads (aka. socializes) the costs of its cowardice to women and onto other people who work keeping neighborhoods alive. We call this resilience. It is unpaid grief labor that props up a fear industry and an outrage economy.

Healthy democracies bury children and then change laws after funerals. We bury children and change the subject. We export talk about liberty while importing tactics from failed states. We ask families to adapt to violence and call it freedom. We ask schools to harden and call it safety. We ask police to solve what policy refuses to touch and call it order.

American history is an archive of erasures. A monstrously cruel and deeply uncivilized throughline runs through our national story. That is why those in power and their allies fight so hard to bleach the pages. Book bans and gag rules are pre-damage control. If you shrink the record, you shrink accountability. I refuse that erasure. Many of us do.

Here is the other truth. Once the racists, conditional-minded voter extremists, bigots, Christian nationalists, and anyone who prefers spectacle to law realize they have destroyed something that could have been remarkable and equitable, it will be too late. By then, those of us who kept showing up will be ready. We have been surviving, planning, and caring for our communities. We will be in a steadier state to do what needs to be done. Mentally. Emotionally. Civically. We will bring mutual aid, trusted networks, working notes, and a habit of listening.

How we got here is not mysterious. Money over mercy. Power over service. White supremacy laundering itself through policy. Religion fused with statecraft. Media that monetizes outrage. Courts shaped by minority rule. A culture that confuses cruelty with strength.

Call it what it is. A protection racket in patriotic clothes. If you refuse to pay, they call you un-American. If you pay, your child learns that safety is a purchase, not a promise.

Five moves for people who bring the hammer

• Win the boring seats: school board, sheriff, district attorney, library board, hospital board. Decide curriculum, counselors, and campus safety that protects the living.
• Fund local violence‑interruption programs and trauma care. Expand trauma capacity and fund partnerships for community-based healing.
• Pass safe‑storage and red‑flag laws at the county level where statehouses stall. Focus on community safety over spectacle.
• Teach the uncut history in homes, libraries, classrooms, and churches that still believe truth heals. Keep truth accessible. Build civic literacy and counter the erasure machine
• Build mutual‑aid networks that outlast news cycles and elections.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. We do not have time to argue about its length. We walk. We organize. We vote. We litigate. We teach the uncut history. We protect each other in public. We build local power that outlasts news cycles. When the ash settles, we build again. Not to restore what was. To make what should be.

Grief is not a policy. Rage is not a plan. Guns are not gods. We choose the hammer.

 

Author: Tasha Monroe

Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.

Writer & Editor, The Commons Dispatch