I know that what follows isn’t a “proper” blog post, but I offer it with a sense of urgency.

Below you’ll find an “open letter” from New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl to Tennessee Governor Lee after the slaughter at the Covenant School, along with her column yesterday about young Tennesseeans marching for their lives as Tennesseean legislators prepare to crush democracy and dissent. 

I’ve become a big fan of Margaret Renkl, who covers flora, fauna, culture and politics in the American South, largely from her front porch in Nashville, Tennessee. Whether capturing the change of seasons or the wildlife around her, Renkl is invariably and exquisitely attentive. Recently, it’s her astute and poignant columns about politics and our democracy that have caught my attention (and heart).

For those of you who might want to read more of Margaret Renkl’s NY Times commentaries, I’ve pulled out a few of my recent favorites with links to the full piece.

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An Open Letter to Governor Lee on the Slaughter of Our Children

March 29, 2023 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — Dear Gov. Bill Lee,

For more than 24 hours, I waited for you to speak to the people of Tennessee about the massacre of Nashville schoolchildren and the adults who gave their lives trying to keep them safe. These were your citizens. These children were your children. This shattered faith community is exactly the kind of community that gives you solace in your own moments of fear and despair. What would you say to them? To us?

What promises of reform would you offer? What vows before God that nothing like this would ever happen to another family on your watch? To another innocent child?

I waited to hear.

I have never had any reason to believe that you would represent my own views and my own values in the governance of this state, but I still had hope that the murder of children would have the power, however temporarily, to carry us to common ground. God help me, I still had enough faith in your humanity to hope that you might be moved by the obliterated bodies of these tiny Tennesseans to do something. To lead us somewhere better. At the very least to promise that you would try.

For more than 24 hours, you did not speak.

I live in a quiet neighborhood. In that quiet, it is possible to hear sirens from miles away. When the sirens started Monday, I was standing in my front yard talking to a friend. At first I didn’t even register the keening, but almost immediately it became an uncountable number of sirens. Police sirens and fire engine sirens and the heart-chilling sound of ambulance sirens.

For two hours, Governor Lee, it was nothing but sirens. Sirens going and sirens coming. Sirens loud enough to be heard indoors, and from every room in the house. Sirens in the background of every phone call that morning, as people kept checking in to compare notes. What have you heard?

That many sirens can mean only one thing, I knew, but I prayed with every cell in my body to be wrong about that. Please, God, not a school. There are so many schools in the first-ring suburbs — public and private schools, preschools and elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. Please, God, let it be none of them. Please, not one of them.

Do you know what people do after a sudden loss like this, Governor? They question every single choice they have ever made. They lie in the dark and wonder how one little shift in the trajectory of time might have led to some other outcome. Would a different school have been safer? What if I’d believed that story about a stomach ache? Should I have kept them home with me, never let them leave my side? Should I have quit my job and home-schooled them?

This is the heartbreak after the heartbreak — the way we all think it might have been our own fault somehow. Whatever terrible thing has happened, we find a way to make it our own fault. Everyone who has lived through a sudden loss knows that. I thought for sure you knew it, too.

However distant we might be from the epicenter of that school and the survivors whose lives will never, ever be the same, we are all broken by these images. Oh, those tiny, tiny children! Oh, their beautiful, beautiful protectors! How could we have saved them? What could we possibly have done to save them?

Every parent in the country, and everyone who isn’t a parent, too, is asking these questions. What can I do to be sure another child isn’t next? Why aren’t you asking it?

I ask it all the time, and I don’t even have school-age children. I ask because my husband is a teacher, because our son is a teacher, because my brother is a teacher and my sister is a teacher and my oldest and closest friends — here in Nashville and around the country — are teachers.

I am proud of all the people I love who have given their lives to teaching, but I am so afraid for them. I lie awake in fear for them. A person who accepts the immense challenges of teaching children shouldn’t be obliged to accept the responsibility of shielding them from bullets, too. And yet every teacher does exactly that. Every single one of them scans every classroom they enter, looking for the hiding places, testing the locks on doors.

There’s nothing they can do to keep their students, or their own children, from being next. But you could, Governor Lee, if you wanted to. You may be the only one in this entire state who could do something to protect our children. You could do it, if you wanted to.

You could support legislation that would ban assault weapons. I’m not so naïve as to believe that banning assault weapons would prevent all school shootings, but it would prevent many, many deaths. It would slow the rampage. It would give police officers — who even more than teachers are called to put their lives on the line to protect us — a fighting chance. Weapons of war do not belong in the hands of civilians. We all know that. You know that.

I’m not trying to talk you out of your support for gun rights, Governor Lee. You wouldn’t need to back down on gun rights. We can argue till kingdom come about background checks and registration requirements and gun safes and biometric trigger locks, and I’d be very happy to talk with you about all the safety measures you could support that would honor your commitment to gun rights and public safety both.

It was never likely that events this week would change your commitment to serving up every item on the gun lobby’s agenda, I admit, but I still had hope. There’s nothing “other” about this school community to hide behind, no way to pass it off as something that only happens in other places. Maybe you would see it this time. Maybe it would be personal this time. I kept hoping that your delay in responding was a sign that you were gathering the courage to do the right thing.

You weren’t, though. When you finally spoke, it was not to introduce a plan to reduce gun violence and prevent the slaughter of our community’s beloved children. When you finally spoke, it was to say nothing at all.

As Young People March for Their Lives, Tennessee Crushes Dissent and Overrides Democracy

April 5, 2023 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — Yesterday  the eyes of the country were on the indictment of a former president, along with the all too real possibility that political or public chaos would erupt as a result. Here in Tennessee, we were watching a different kind of chaos unfold as our state government doubled down on its love affair with guns, even in the immediate aftermath of a horrific school shooting. I wish I could tell you that guns were the worst of it.

Last Thursday, in the wake of the shooting, peaceful protesters at the Tennessee State Capitol rallied for gun reform. Activists waved signs in the statehouse gallery, and Representatives Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson and Justin J. Pearson, all Democrats, led them in chants from the House floor during breaks. Between bills, the lawmakers also approached the podium to speak. They did not wait to be formally recognized.

On Monday, statehouse Republicans stripped all three of their committee memberships and deactivated their ID badges. The Democrats “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives,” the formal resolutions against them read. Tomorrow, the House will vote on whether to expel the three lawmakers for talking out of turn.

Expulsion is extremely rare in Tennessee history. As the Politico reporter Natalie Allison pointed out on Twitter, the Tennessee House didn’t even vote to expel a Republican legislator who had been accused of sexually assaulting three teenage girls.

The resolutions against Mr. Jones, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Pearson were filed against a backdrop that highlights the absurdity of the actions Republicans have taken against them.

On Monday at 10:13 a.m., one week to the minute after a shooter armed with military-style weapons entered the church-affiliated Covenant School and murdered three children and three adults, more than 7,000 Nashville students staged a walkout to demand gun reform. It was a sight to behold: Vanderbilt University students marching down one street, Belmont University studentsmarching down another, all of them joining a large crowd of high school and college students from around town. They were determined to speak as one voice directly to their government — to the only people with any power to reduce the risks they take just by going to class. FULL COMMENTARY

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The Beautiful and Terrifying Arrival of an Early Spring

March 6, 2023 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — At first I thought this winter’s strange weather was merely part of the boomerang pattern we contend with more and more frequently in these climate-troubled days — warm spells that might rightly be called hot spells, hard freezes that descend so quickly the plants don’t have time to adjust. On one January day, the temperature fell so far so fast here that many nonnative evergreen trees and shrubs froze to death. On one February day the high hit 85 degrees, destroying records and causing my woolly-haired dog to stretch out on the hardwood floor, panting. I hadn’t thought to schedule the groomer so early in the year.

But the uncommonly warm days of winter turned out not to be a warm spell or even a hot spell. The uncommonly warm days of winter turned out to be spring. FULL COMMENTARY

This Is How Red States Silence Blue Cities. And Democracy.

Jan. 16, 2023 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — January in Nashville ushers in two forces for chaos: erratic weather and irrational legislators. Both are hugely disruptive. Neither is surprising anymore.

In the age of climate change, the old joke about New England — if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes — is true all over the country. But even erratic weather, sometimes careening between thunderstorms and snow in a single day, is easier to cope with than the G.O.P. Unlike human beings, weather isn’t supposed to be rational.

Neither, it seems, are Republicans, at least not anymore, and a blue city that serves as the capital of a red state had better brace itself when the legislature arrives in town. Nothing good ever comes when the Tennessee General Assembly reconvenes, but any Nashvillian paying attention understood that this time the usual assaults would be unusually bad. FULL COMMENTARY

Falling a Little Bit in Love With the Dark

Dec. 19, 2022 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — This year the winter solstice arrives on Dec. 21 in the shank of the dark afternoon. Officially the first day of astronomical winter, the solstice is better known as the shortest day of the year. I prefer to think of it as the longest night of the year, for I am making friends with darkness.

For most of my life, I looked forward to the solstice because it signals a shift to longer days. I was never a fan of winter, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets always felt to me like a kind of compensation for the cold. But my heart has been thawing these past years, watching as winter becomes ever more fragile, its cold imperiled by the changing climate, its darkness by our own foolishness and fear. FULL COMMENTARY

How to Give Thanks in a Screwed-Up World

Nov. 21, 2022 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — My father always had a ready answer to the question that greases the gears of human discourse. Whenever anyone he didn’t know particularly well — a neighbor or a sales clerk or someone at church — would ask, “How are you, Mr. Renkl?” my father didn’t say, “Just fine, thank you.” His answer was always “Fantastic!” Later, when he was dying, it was the answer he gave even to family members checking in. Right up to his death, he was always faaaantastic.

Even before he got sick, this answer was an inexplicable exaggeration. Money was always short in our house, and Mom struggled intermittently with depression, but you would not have known any of that from the way my father greeted others, always with an unexpectedly cheery answer to the throwaway question people asked out of nothing but common courtesy.

I think about my father every day, but I’ve been thinking about him more than usual lately. Not only because Thanksgiving is coming on, that time when the ache of my missing elders is especially acute, but because I am trying to remind myself how to see the world as my father saw it. FULL COMMENTARY

I Just Turned 60, but I Still Feel 22

Nov. 1, 2021 | By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — I was already in college before I finally understood that my entire life had overlapped with second-wave feminism, a force that transformed American culture without so much as registering on a certain young woman in Alabama. All my life I had been stepping through open doors, it turned out, blithely unaware of the vision and sacrifice and passionate persistence of the women who had opened those doors for me.

Once I understood that, I also understood that I wouldn’t want to have landed on this planet a single moment earlier than I did.

A woman born in Lower Alabama in 1961 has little use for nostalgia. Go back to the “good old days” when women were limited to professions like education and nursing and little else? Back to a time when the opportunities available to Black and brown people, and to Black and brown women especially, were even more profoundly limited? No, thank you very much.

The only trouble with being born in 1961 is that in 2021 you turn 60, something I did last week. It’s very strange to persist in feeling 22, even as every mirror — and every storefront window and polished elevator door — reveals the truth. Sixty is the point at which people must admit they are no longer middle-aged. FULL COMMENTARY

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