America grieves the spectacular tragedies while ignoring the slow, grinding ones.
Every time a school shooting takes place in America, the nation gasps, mourns, and debates. The latest tragedy drew days of wall-to-wall coverage, as they always do. Yet while our media and politicians fixate on the details of one horrific event, thousands of children in Gaza and Ukraine have been killed in conflicts that barely register on our screens. The imbalance is glaring: one tragedy becomes national obsession, while another is treated as background noise.
But even within the tragedies that seize our attention, we often look away from the deeper forces at work.
In this most recent shooting, much was made of the fact that the perpetrator was transgender. What went unsaid is just as important: we live in a political climate where transgender people are relentlessly dehumanized. No figure has done more to stoke that climate than Donald Trump. For years, he has trafficked in mockery, scapegoating, and outright hostility toward LGBTQ people, and his allies have followed suit. This rhetoric doesn’t just disappear once it’s spoken. It lingers, festers, and fuels alienation and despair.
Trump has been called “Teflon Don” because scandals and outrages slide off him without consequence. But the consequences are real. They show up in the broken families who follow his cues and disown their children. They show up in the pulpits that echo his rhetoric and call LGBTQ lives an abomination. They show up in the suicides of queer youth who internalize this hostility. And, yes, they show up in acts of violence that make the news — yet somehow, Trump himself escapes responsibility.
We’ve seen this pattern before. In the Pulse nightclub massacre of 2016, the narrative was neatly tied to terrorism. But beneath the headlines was another truth: the shooter’s father had rejected his son’s bisexuality. That rejection festered into rage and shame. The shooter’s girlfriend was prosecuted as complicit, but the toxic root — the family rejection, the cultural stigma — was never put on trial.
This silence is part of a broader refusal to confront what hate speech, rejection, and stigma actually do. The damage is not confined to headline-grabbing massacres. It shows up in the daily lives of LGBTQ people in countless ways: broken homes, kids thrown out of their families, people cut off from their churches, youth bullied until they drop out of school, and suicide rates that are tragically higher than among their peers.
Every sermon that declares LGBTQ lives sinful, every law proposed to erase their existence, every parent who turns away from their own child — these are not abstract harms. They are acts of violence. They carve deep wounds that leave people vulnerable, isolated, and convinced that even God has abandoned them.
What we must finally admit is this: violence doesn’t only happen when a gun is fired. Violence also happens when words degrade, when families disown, when pulpits condemn, and when whole communities turn their backs. And yet, society responds to those slow, grinding violences with shrugs — while reserving its outrage for the spectacular bloodshed that makes the evening news.
If we claim to care about children, our compassion must be consistent. It cannot stop at the edge of a schoolyard in Tennessee but ignore the mass graves of Gaza or Ukraine. If we claim to care about human dignity, that dignity must extend to every LGBTQ child sitting in a pew, terrified their parents will find out who they are.
The cycle we are in — selective mourning, shallow analysis, silence on root causes — will only continue to produce more despair and more death. We have to break it. That means holding leaders accountable for the rhetoric they use, naming the damage caused by family and church rejection, and expanding our outrage beyond borders and beyond headlines.
Until we do, our mourning will always be incomplete. And our prayers, no matter how fervent, will remain empty words.
Rick Painter
