What We’ve Forgotten: On School Shootings, American Apathy, and the Collapse of Relationship Ethics

By: Dr. Xochitl Vallejos

There’s something profoundly broken at the heart of American life—and it’s not just the endless headlines of violence. It’s the silence that follows them. The normalization. The numbness. The inability—or refusal—to collectively care.

Each time children are murdered in their classrooms, the cycle repeats: shock, a brief wave of online mourning, politicized debates, and then—business as usual.

We’ve learned to scroll past dead kids.

We have learned to rationalize the deaths of children in schools as a reasonable cost to pay for our alleged freedoms. We have learned to watch videos captioned “the sound of children screaming has been removed” and then to go watch the next NFL game without pausing to think about why we can accept that. We watch children screaming, reaching for their parents as masked Gestapo agents tear them away for the crime of seeking asylum and eat our pizza without blinking.

We have learned to protect our own emotional distance instead of the lives of others.

But this isn’t just about gun policy or medical policy or immigration policy. This is about relationship ethics—about the ways we've been conditioned to detach, isolate, and individualize, even in the face of mass suffering.

Late-stage American culture rewards disconnection. Rugged individualism is sacralized. Mutual care is seen as a weakness. Entire systems are built to reward profit over people, punishment over repair, and power over empathy. It’s no wonder that in a society like this, children become collateral damage—and adults become spectators.

We are living in a nation that has forgotten how to care.

But this forgetting didn’t happen overnight.

The foundations of the United States were laid in blood. The colonizers who settled on this land brought with them an ethos of domination and dehumanization. To justify the theft of land and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, to rationalize the mass enslavement of African people, they had to kill something in themselves first: the capacity to see others as fully human.

That dehumanization wasn’t just enacted—it was institutionalized. Codified in law, normalized through religion, taught as truth. Generations were raised to see Black life as property, Indigenous life as expendable, and white supremacy as divine order. The very notion of “freedom” was built on the backs of those denied it.

This is the origin story of American relationship ethics: not one of mutuality, but of extraction. Not one of reciprocity, but of domination.

And though the systems have evolved, that psychic wound has not healed. It has metastasized.

The lie of white supremacy, the logic of disposability, the practice of disconnection—they’re no longer just tools of empire. They’ve infected us all. We are the zombies who have traded our humanity for a pain free life–all we have to do is consume those around us.

When you are raised inside an empire that teaches you some lives matter more than others, it is only a matter of time before you begin to withdraw from the humanity of everyone, including your neighbors. Including yourself.

We don’t do this because care is impossible but because care is inconvenient under capitalism. Care is unprofitable, unscalable, and unruly. Because care asks something of us—and we’ve been taught that anything that costs us discomfort is not our responsibility. Care is messy conversations, repaired ruptures, self-awareness and compassion. Care comes at a cost.

Here’s the truth: once they can get you to not care about your neighbors in Palestine, it becomes easier to get you to not care about your neighbors in Mexico. Then it becomes easier to not care about your neighbors across town. And eventually, you stop caring about the family next door. Trans people, immigrants, disabled people, unhoused people all become disposable in the dehumanized mind.

This is systematic desensitization—not just a psychological concept, but a political tool. Originally used in therapy to reduce phobias, it works by gradually exposing someone to a disturbing stimulus until it no longer feels disturbing. Applied at scale, it becomes a method of control.

When we’re shown suffering over and over without any pathway to act, we begin to shut down. We start to see violence as inevitable. We treat preventable deaths as background noise. We stop feeling. We stop responding. We stop believing anything can change—and that’s exactly the point.

Desensitization numbs us so thoroughly that care itself starts to feel naive. Radical empathy begins to seem absurd. And instead of resisting, we adapt to the violence. We keep going to work. We keep posting. We keep scrolling.

This isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system.

It’s why the erosion of relationship ethics is not accidental—it’s strategic. Because people who remember how to care are harder to manipulate. People who grieve together organize together. People who feel still have a chance to resist.

We need to talk about school shootings not only as a political issue, but as a relational one. What does it say about us that we do not change, even for our children? That even the most horrific forms of violence cannot interrupt our denial?

This is not just a cultural sickness. It is a failure of love.

And that is why we need a relationship revolution.

We need a love revolution not only in the romantic or nuclear, but in the communal…the political…In the radical commitment to practice care as an ethic, not just a feeling.

Relationship ethics means we take responsibility for how we show up in the world. It means we learn to stay with discomfort. We learn to mourn publicly, to wail in the streets to help the communities remember how to grieve. We learn to actively disrupt harm, to place our bodies on the line. We learn to act in service of others, even when it doesn’t directly benefit us because we know that our liberation is intertwined with theirs and that while some of us aren’t free, none of us are free.

It means we stop outsourcing care to professionals and policies and start reclaiming it as a collective obligation.

Until we do, we will keep witnessing the same tragedies on repeat—children murdered, people numbed, politicians posturing. Without a revolution toward relationship ethics, there is no functioning society—only spectacle that will eventually lead to annihilation. As more and more people get eaten by the machine, the closer they come to you and as the old poem goes, when they finally come for you, there will be no one left to save you.

We were never meant to live like this.