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A Tale of Two Doors
The Uvalde, Texas mass murder is a tale of two doors: a teachers’ door and a classroom door. Both represent challenges to the best-laid plans, however earnestly advocated and lavishly funded. Any after-action review, any honest assessment leading to future recommendations to protect school children, must incorporate the human elements revealed by the teachers’ door and the classroom door.
The killer gained access through a door designated for teachers. This door was shown, on camera, being propped open by a teacher shortly before the attack began. We may surmise that propping this door open was a fairly routine occurrence. Hands up if you have an explanation for this behavior.
He served in the British Navy during World War II. Before the war, William Golding was a humanist, assured that people are perfectible, that humans can bring into being some future utopia. In Golding’s words, “All you had to do was to remove certain inequities and provide practical sociological solutions, and man would have a perfect paradise on earth.” After the war, Golding wrote a novel, the theme of which was about what he called “the defects of human nature.”
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. –Edmund Burke
[Updated upon considering some comments. Deletions noted by strike-through; italics annotate additions.]
I recently finished Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, the plot of which centers around the conflicts of a host of characters inside a Nazi death camp — German soldiers, their wives, children, and, of course, the Jews. The book was 
Nothing. If history has taught us anything, it is that mankind excels at doing bad while pretending to be noble and otherwise.
If you haven’t seen the 