Make no mistake about this bit of tragic reality: a beautiful South Texas community is going to be tagged with an identifier that links it to tragedy.
It burst onto our national consciousness Tuesday with the shooting deaths at Robb Elementary School of 19 children and two educators who sought to shield the kids from the lunatic who burst into the school brandishing an AR-15 rifle.
Police killed the shooter. But not before the gunman killed all those children and the teachers who fought to protect them.
My question now is whether Uvalde will be associated forever with tragedy. Or will the town of about 15,000 people be known as the place that stirred legislators, governors, members of Congress to act — finally! — in the interests of protecting other children in other communities?
My heart and my head are conflicting with each other on this one. My heart requires me to hope that Uvalde becomes synonymous with actual reform to stop gun violence, particularly the kind of hideous violence that has thrown the nation into this spasm of grief. My head, though, yanks me back into reality, in that we have traveled down this path too many times already only to be saddened at the lack of reform.
I won’t give up on my hope for the former.
Still, we have a lot of grieving and mourning to complete as we seek to grasp the ghastly reality of what has just unfolded.