You're Scared for Your Kids? So Are We.

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On Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sat in front of a House appropriations subcommittee — the first time sitting justices have testified to Congress since 2019 — and made the case for more security funding. She told the story of coming home with a bulletproof vest during the Dobbs leak fallout, setting it down in her bedroom, and turning around to find her 12-year-old son standing in the doorway asking what it was. She described a swatting incident at her home in May, her teenage son opening the front door to a street full of police cars responding to a fake 911 call. She said the threats have forced her kids “to think about and see things that children should not have to see or think about.”

Let me be very clear about something up front: I don’t want that for anybody. Not for Justice Barrett, not for her kids, not for anyone — including people I have profound disagreements with, which absolutely includes Barrett and her Republican colleagues on the Court. Nobody’s children should live like that. Full stop.

But I have to be honest with you about my immediate, gut-level reaction to that testimony, because it wasn’t sympathy. It was rage. Deep in my soul, rage.

Because what she described — that awful, stomach-turning experience of explaining an unthinkable threat to your own child — is what millions of American parents do every single year. We just call it “back to school.”

One of the worst days of parenting I’ve ever had was my son’s first active shooter drill. The school sent home an instructional sheet ahead of time. An instructional sheet. How to talk to your kid about the possibility that a man with a gun might come to his classroom. He was too young to really understand any of it, but he understood enough to seem scared. He seemed unsafe. And I remember thinking: this is only going to get worse. Wait until he’s old enough to actually understand what he’s drilling for. Wait until it happens at his school, or the school one town over, or the school of a kid he knows.

What kind of learning environment are we creating when we ask children to rehearse for their own potential murder? And what kind of country are we running when the federal government will not do one damn thing to prevent it? We don’t even acknowledge these shootings anymore. They happen constantly, and as long as the body count isn’t too high, we just move on. We don’t stop. We don’t mourn. We’ve fully normalized it. That should horrify all of us, and instead it barely registers.

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So here’s the thing that made my blood boil watching that hearing: safety in this country has become a privilege reserved for the children of the powerful. Justice Barrett’s kids will get their security detail, and they should — she holds one of the most consequential positions in American government, and the threats against her are real. But my kid deserves to be safe too. Your kid deserves to be safe. Every kid in every school in America deserves to be safe.

Instead, we live in a country where even modest attempts to make schools safer, whether through mental health resources, school safety investments, or keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people — are routinely blocked by Republicans in Congress. And if something did survive Congress? There’s a very real chance it would end up before a Supreme Court that has spent years narrowing what government is allowed to do.

That’s the part she doesn’t seem to grasp. If she’s expecting a groundswell of public sympathy, she should understand that she is actively contributing to the despair that so many Americans feel about their government. People have given up because nothing gets done. Everything is stalled. The Supreme Court isn’t some neutral referee standing above that dysfunction. It’s one of the institutions helping shape it. When people lose faith that government can solve problems, they don’t separate Congress from the Court. They see one system that keeps failing them.

So yes, I feel for her. Genuinely. And it still comes off as profoundly tone-deaf — another example of very powerful, very wealthy, very insulated people in Washington trapped in their echo chambers, with no idea how the rest of us live.

Because if you’re not a parent, maybe you’ve never felt that sinking feeling of sending your kid off in the morning and not knowing, really knowing, that they’ll come back. I feel it constantly. Sometimes when I drop my son off at school, I linger for a minute and just watch him hang out with his friends, because some part of me is scared something will happen to him. I can’t protect him forever. I know that. I’m not trying to bubble-wrap his life or sand down every hard edge.

But damn it, maybe I can help build a world that’s a little safer for him. A world where a bad man with a gun doesn’t show up at his school. Where his school has what it needs. Where he has good health care. Where he can just be a kid. That’s the bare minimum. Taking care of our kids — all of our kids, not just the powerful ones — is the least a functioning country should do.

Justice Barrett’s children deserve to feel safe. So does mine. So does yours.

When do the rest of us get a hearing?