Thoughts and Prayers for the Nation With a Broken Heart
From the First Schoolhouse Massacre to Today’s Sanctuaries Under Fire; How a Nation Numbed by Fear Learned to Live With Its Own Heartache
“A future filled with hope.”
That was the scripture theme chosen by Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis this week to mark the start of the new school year. It’s drawn from the book of Jeremiah in the Bible - “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future filled with hope.”
Those words were printed on banners, spoken at assemblies, and read aloud as children gathered for their first Mass, minutes before gunfire ripped through the sanctuary.
A 23-year-old shooter opened fire through the church windows before turning the gun on themselves. Two children - just eight and ten years old - were killed. Seventeen others were wounded. Authorities now call it both a hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism.
The scripture had promised safety, prosperity, and hope. Instead, the prayers ended in sirens and shattered glass - yet another American school shooting, the 138th incident like it on U.S. school grounds so far in 2025.
In its wake, the heartache we feel is all too familiar. Acts like this used to stop the news cycle for weeks, but now the headlines flare, politicians send their “thoughts and prayers,” and within days the country moves on.
It’s not that we don’t care - many of us feel the grief so acutely we hardly know what to do with it - but as a society, we’ve somehow decided this is just the cost of living in America. Kids risk their lives simply by going to school, and nobody seems willing or able to stop it.
Calls for common-sense gun laws are now echoing as they do after every shooting, but those calls are being ignored, as always. Nothing changes. The cycle just grinds on.
But what if the problem isn’t only the guns? What if the solution isn’t in more restrictions, or metal detectors, or bulletproof backpacks, or teachers armed with rifles?
What if this recurring violence is only a symptom - the smoke from a much older fire burning at the nation’s core, one these acts have been calling attention to for generations?
What if there’s a truth America’s been avoiding for centuries, and now it’s breaking the surface and there’s nowhere left to run?
The sky itself says: enough with the thoughts and prayers.
It’s time to go straight to the heart.
No other developed country on Earth comes close to the United States in terms of the number and deadliness of school shootings each year.
Other nations have experienced isolated tragedies, like Dunblane in Scotland (1996), Winnenden in Germany (2009), or Kerch in Crimea (2018) and more recently, the Graz school shooting in Austria (June 2025) and the Örebro attack in Sweden (February 2025).
There was even a Bosnian school shooting in 2024 and three separate attacks on a Toronto school that same year, though thankfully without casualties in Canada’s case. Still, these events. on other countries remain rare, one-off shocks.
In the U.S., by contrast, school shootings now happen with disturbing regularity, sometimes multiple times a month. They are a uniquely American phenomenon, and they’re nothing new.
The Day the Schoolhouse Doors Blew Open
Most people track America’s trouble with school shootings back to the end of the last century when two students in Littleton, Colorado murdered twelve classmates and a teacher in a rampage at Columbine High in 1999. But that was just the point at which gun violence in schools began occurring with regularity - the moment school shootings in America shifted from occasional nightmare to a grim, routine risk of going to class.
Before Columbine in 1999, school shootings in the U.S. averaged about 16 incidents per year through the 1990s, but now that number has exploded - the U.S. experiences an average of 45+ school shootings per year, with 2021‑22 alone recording 327 incidents in a single school year.
Deaths have risen too. The average number of Americans killed per mass school shooting doubled from 7.6 deaths per incident in the 1990’s to 14.0 deaths per incident over the last decade.
Since Columbine, every generation of American children has grown up knowing that the threat could strike inside their own classrooms. Sandy Hook in 2012. Parkland in 2018. Uvalde in 2022. And now, this week, we add the massacre in Minnesota to the ever-growing list of shooting tragedies in American schools.
In response to the violence, U.S. lawmakers have installed metal detectors, implemented lockdown drills, and endorsed bulletproof backpacks, building fortresses around children instead of confronting the guns themselves.
Fortress Classrooms and False Security
Since the turn of the century, a whole industry has sprung up around “hardening” American schools, turning classrooms into fortresses complete with bulletproof backpacks, panic buttons, AI scanners and even drone-response systems, none of which has managed to stop the rising death toll.
Like school shootings, the billion dollar school security industry is also uniquely American. You won’t find this level of security theater in places like Europe, Canada, or Australia. After mass shootings in those countries, lawmakers responded with sweeping gun reforms, not a catalog of classroom fortifications. A child in Sweden or the U.K. walks into school through a regular door, not a metal detector. Their backpack isn’t see-through, bulletproof, or trauma-tested. Because in most developed nations, preventing the violence is the focus, not just defending against it.
The U.S. government’s response to repeated school shootings has been, to many, both baffling and grotesque. The rest of the world (and many Americans) have watched on in disbelief as lawmakers have twisted themselves into knots to avoid tightening gun laws - the one thing everyone knows could actually save lives. With the death toll only climbing, the obvious question remains: why such inaction?
The answer cuts deeper than most realize. School shootings have haunted America for more than two hundred years. This didn’t begin in a sanctuary in Minnesota, or even at Columbine. This scourge is rooted in something much older and far deeper.
Ghosts in the Halls Long Before 1999
To understand why no law, no lockdown, no metal detector has stopped gun violence in American schools, we have to step back through the nation’s long shadow. Long before those two boys in black coats walked into their Colorado high school in 1999, violence had already been pulsing through American classrooms like a slow heartbeat no one wanted to hear.
In 1989, a man with a rifle stepped onto the playground at Cleveland Elementary in Stockton, California, and opened fire on the children gathered there. Five never made it home. Thirty-two others carried the bullets in their bodies or the terror in their memories for the rest of their lives. It shocked the country, but only briefly.
A decade earlier, another Cleveland Elementary - this one in San Diego - made headlines when sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer leaned out her window with a rifle and began shooting into the schoolyard across the street. Two adults were killed, eight children wounded, a police officer hit. When asked why she did it, Brenda gave the line that would echo in infamy: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
And long before either of those schools, there was the summer day in 1966 when Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas clock tower with a sniper rifle. From high above the campus, he turned the quad into a killing ground - fourteen dead, thirty-one wounded - an entire nation watching in horror as the massacre unfolded live on television for the first time. Many call this the birth of the modern mass shooting.
But even that wasn’t the beginning. The decades before held scattered shootings across the Midwest and South: students killing schoolmasters after disputes over discipline, townspeople bringing guns into classrooms when local feuds turned violent. These didn’t make national news. They were tragedies swallowed by time, remembered only in dusty local records or fading family stories.
And further back still - before the nation was even the nation - four Lenape warriors, watching their lands stolen and their villages burned, walked into a small frontier schoolhouse in Pennsylvania in 1764. They killed the teacher and ten children, leaving the bodies in the sun as a warning. It was part of Pontiac’s War, one battle in the long resistance to British conquest.
The first school shooting in America was born from colonization itself, from the violence at the country’s core.
The Violence at America’s Core
America’s violent roots can be traced right back to before the states were even united, to the ships crossing the Atlantic in the 1700s, carrying settlers who saw land not as sacred or shared but as territory to be claimed.
It began with doctrines like Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery - European ideas that said the people already living on this continent didn’t count, that their homes could be taken because their skin color was the wrong so was their faith.
It began with the displacement and slaughter of Native nations. With the transatlantic slave trade that chained millions of Africans into the bellies of ships and sold them on auction blocks. With the belief that power and profit mattered more than human life, and that violence was an acceptable price for both.
By the time four Lenape warriors attacked that Pennsylvania schoolhouse in 1764, entire villages had already been wiped out by disease, war, and forced removal. Colonists had burned Native towns, destroyed crops, and paid bounties for scalps. Pontiac’s War, the uprising raging that summer, was a response to years of betrayal and bloodshed. The Lenape attack wasn’t random cruelty - it was the echo of a continent already soaked in violence.
The first school shooting in America was born from that history - from colonization itself, from conquest and retaliation, from the idea that you can take what you want if your gun is bigger and your god says it’s fine.
History Always Collects Its Debts
It’s an uncomfortable truth that America was built on conquest, on stolen land, on enslaved bodies, on the myth of redemptive violence - the belief that guns and power will keep you safe, that killing can purchase freedom, that you can harm others without destroying yourself in the process.
That belief became the national story. It justified the taking of land. It rationalized centuries of slavery. It wrapped the frontier, the Revolution, and even modern wars in the language of liberty while the ground was still wet with blood.
But history always catches up. Nations carry memories, just like people do, and at certain moments those memories rise to the surface. Patterns repeat, and old wounds demand to be faced.
For the United States, that moment is now.
History has a clock, and for America, it just struck midnight.
Every country has a birth chart, the same way every person does, and in astrology, the slowest-moving planet, Pluto, acts like the cosmic record-keeper. It circles back roughly every 250 years to the exact place it occupied when a nation was founded, and when that happens, the country meets its own shadow. The things it’s built on - the power, the wounds, the lies, the unfinished business - all rise up to be reckoned with.
Pluto’s return doesn’t bring polite conversations or minor reforms. It brings reckonings, collapses and transformations that leave the old world unrecognizable so something new can rise.
And right now, America is standing inside its Pluto Return, with the same question echoing through every mass shooting, every act of political violence, every fraying institution:
What will it take for America to turn from violence?
Because this can go on no longer. The rising death toll says so, the fear in every classroom says so, and Pluto itself demands so.
Fear: The First American Religion
For many modern Americans, guns symbolise freedom, but to early Americans they were a shield against fear. Fear of the Native nations whose land was being taken. Fear of the British soldiers marching across the colonies. Fear of the wilderness itself - the forests, the wolves, the winters, the unknown. And later, fear of slave uprisings on plantations built through violence and cruelty.
From the start, America armed itself not because it was brave, but because it was terrified, and when you live afraid, you start to believe safety comes through power. That if you can outgun the danger, you can outlive it. That if you can kill the threat, you can finally rest.
But fear never leaves when you feed it violence. It grows and hardens and turns into a worldview where every neighbor could be an enemy, every stranger a threat, every problem a nail waiting for the hammer.
So the guns stayed, even when the Redcoats left. Even when the frontier was “tamed.” Even when slavery was abolished. The fear had sunk too deep by then. It had become part of the nation’s nervous system, passed down like an heirloom through centuries: the belief that safety requires dominance, that freedom requires the capacity to kill for it.
And to carry that belief, generation after generation, the heart had to close. Because you cannot live on stolen land, built by stolen labor, while keeping your heart fully open. You have to numb yourself to survive the contradiction.
This is the wound Pluto is now dragging into daylight. The fear at the bottom of the story. The closing of the heart that followed. The violence that grew out of both.
And now the sky is asking: will America finally feel what it has spent 250 years running from?
The Nation With a Broken Heart
Pluto does not reveal a wound just to let you look away again. It always brings the same choice: keep clinging to what is killing you, or transform.
America has been brandishing guns for centuries to outrun its fear, but now there is nowhere left to run - in today’s America, fear is what most feel acutely every single day. Fear in classrooms, in public spaces, in politics. Sold by the headlines, stoked by every campaign ad, weaponized by every strongman promising they alone can fix it.
You can wave a gun at that fear all you like, but it only breeds more of itself. You can point fingers at the cause, and right now half the nation is pointing squarely at the White House, as if removing the current president would cure the sickness. But he’s only the symptom - a reflection of the nation’s deeper ills. Even his suspected heart disease has become a mirror of the country’s own heart under siege.
If America were a body, its sickness would be in its heart, after decades of hardened arteries, rage pumping through the veins. The fear its spent 250 years suppressing has infected the heart, and now the disease is everywhere, leaking through the floorboards no matter how many walls you build, how many laws you pass, or how many times you reload.
Guns won’t fix this one, and nor will bulletproof backpacks.
This fear must be faced. It must be felt. It must be transmuted. That’s the only thing Pluto ever demands in the end.
Because the country that keeps closing its heart will not survive. Not this time. Not under Pluto’s gaze.
The new world will be built on empathy, or it won’t be built at all. It will demand the courage to stay human, to keep feeling, to refuse fear’s pull toward violence, and the numbness that makes violence bearable.
This is what will save America, if anything can: enough people choosing to live with open hearts while the old myths burn behind them.
Pluto has no patience left. The reckoning has arrived.
The Way Forward
The only antidote to fear is its opposite - love. Not the easy kind that waits for permission, but the kind that chooses empathy over numbness, connection over conquest, courage over the false safety of control.
It begins small, with how we speak to each other, how we vote, how we raise our children, how we let ourselves feel what the headlines keep numbing us to.
The solution isn’t coming from the top down. No lawmaker will fix this for America. It has to be done heart by heart, as each of us simply refuses to meet fear with more fear.
We treat our heart disease when we refuse to answer political rage online with more rage of our own, no matter how much we want to “own” the other side. When we turn off the news before it turns our nervous system into a battlefield. When we refuse to believe our neighbor is our enemy just because they think differently, or because some commentator said so.
We begin to heal when parents teach children to handle conflict without fists or fury. When protesters refuse to dehumanize. When faith leaders remember that prayers for peace mean nothing while sermons stoke division.
We soothe our heart sickness when we stop puffing up with threats and anger to hide our fear, when we refuse to lash out in defensiveness and instead learn to stand firm in love.
Because love isn’t passive here. It’s the braver thing. The harder thing. The only thing that keeps the fear from winning.
So no more fortifying our fear with fury. No more hiding behind guns, building higher walls, or staging social media smackdowns because “that bigot deserved it.” That’s still fear stoking violence, just with words instead of a gun; the same sickness in a different disguise.
A country that keeps answering fear with more fear will drown in it. A country that learns to answer fear with love might finally build the world it keeps praying for after every tragedy. Because the old myths are burning already, the only question left is what rises from the ashes.
Pluto says the nation’s reckoning is here, and the only way out now is through - with open eyes, open hands, and open hearts.
No more thoughts and prayers, America.
It’s time to go straight to the heart.
Want to go deeper?
There’s a guide to America’s healing written in the stars. If you want to know the timeline…..[Step into the Inner Circle →]
My intention in my writing is to lessen the climate of fear around world events by offering clarity and cosmic context for what’s unfolding; to bring context to the chaos. I believe our highest calling right now is to anchor in the vibration of love & truth and call in a more beautiful world, and to do that, we must lean out of fear. I hope you read this with an open, uplifted heart.
You have succinctly laid out how we got here, and how the only solution is love. Beautifully written and hard to face our own shadows as a country, but we must if we want to birth a new community. As always, thank you for your words and guidance.
One of the most disturbing yet uplifting articles on what went wrong, why and how do we fix it. 🙏