Olive holds a carrot in her hand and says: "I heard someone in Colorado brought a gun to school and shot people." She looks at Nick and I for a reaction, her eyes don't hold fear or surprise, just sadness and curiosity.
This is her normal. All our children's normal.
Schools regularly plan how to respond to a school shooting. They refine their practice in the same way they update their pedagogy. Hold monthly stay put and lock down drills with the hope that a real event never happens.
Real events keep happening.
We talk about the latest one, about how school shootings happen more and more often, about how we don't think one will happen here in Seward, how that's what most small communities think before another disgruntled teen pulls the trigger.
"Did you know that when your Dad and I were kids we didn't have lock down drills?"
"What???" Elias says, hands in the air, palms up.
By the look on our children's faces, you'd think I said we didn't have desks or bells or teachers who wrote problems on the board for us to solve.
"Why not?" Olive asks.
"Because school shootings didn't happen when I was a kid."
(Nick reminds me that school shootings did happen when we were young, in inner cities, with more specific targets, gang or drug related, before social media, back when these shootings rarely made the national news because they didn't happen in white middle class neighborhoods.)
I still clearly remember sitting in my apartment in Portland Maine, in my mid-twenties, watching the news about Columbine, shocked by the images I saw on TV. The scenes haunted me for months.
Our children don't know a world without the fear of an armed student or intruder bursting into their classroom and pulling the trigger at will.
They practice fleeing or sheltering in place.
Run. Hide. Fight.
Avoid. Deny. Defend.
They learn to barricade doors with filing cabinets and desks. To close the blinds and hide in closets. To throw geography textbooks and plastic chairs.
This is their normal. Part of an average school day, alongside reading buddies and recess.
Students with significant disabilities, like Elias, sit like ducks in the era of flee or fight, with every school as a potential battleground. Please let them sit beside someone capable of saving them when the sound of gunshots disrupts the lesson.
I wonder, do our children daydream about how they personally will respond if their classroom is the next one targeted in this era where no community remains safe from the possibility of bullets in bulletin boards? Do they plan out their escape route in their head during Algebra class? Think about thwarting an imagined intruder during science lessons?
I grew up prior to mandatory seat belts and remember sitting in the middle of the back seat imagining that if we wrecked our car I'd somehow hold my parents back with my brute strength and then fly through the windshield in a heroic act of self-sacrifice. If I grew up today, I'd dream of charging the shooter like Kendrick Castillo did yesterday; imagining myself as the hero who saved my classmates.
And yet in reality, I'd more likely freeze, as I do in emergency situations. I can't know how I'd respond to the threat of someone holding a gun in my classroom as I am not from the School Shooting Generation.
"I didn't even grow up in a place with earthquakes, so the only drills we had were fire drills," I tell my kids.
Line up and evacuate the building. Wait to be counted. Return to class.
"Earthquake drills are my favorite," Olive says. "Because they're fun, everything just shakes."
Oh the innocence she still holds!
"Can I have more chicken?" Elias asks.
And so onwards we travel, to other conversations, to Olive's upcoming Little League practice and Elias's 8th grade field trip to the Alaska Maritime Training Center and Sea Life Center.
Just another Tuesday night dinner, when everything about this is wrong.
I asked friends if they will send their kids to school... on a day a few weeks before THIS shooting you write about when a young woman threatening a Columbine-like event was on the loose in CO and there was a massive manhunt. Our schools were put on lockout. Denver schools were closed. The standard response from my friends: "the kids are prepared and have practiced these drills numerous times." I just can't accept that level of comfort or resignation. I feel trapped in the twilight zone when close friends confidently preach that our kids "know the drill." I question each day if sending my kids off to school to learn how to become good and productive citizens in this messed up society is the best approach. I've been ready to rebel against this craziness for years now but haven't had the family majority vote to make it happen. Historically, many have endured bomb drills under desks, real air raids, and all forms of violence or threats of violence while in school. I guess it's a microcosm of the world we inhabit. Danger everywhere. It's just so prison-like...being trapped in school and subject to gun violence. We know different. Our kids sadly don't. This is their world. The world we pass on to them.
The day Kendrick Castillo was murdered at school being as brave as one could ever hope to be, my daughter's high school lacrosse team drove by the scene just as police and emergency cars began to arrive in Highlands Ranch. She sent me a text to tell me the news. When will her school be next?
Posted by: Greta | 05/13/2019 at 09:09 PM
Greta, have you seen the PSA where the young girl teaches adults what to do in case of a school shooting? Yes, it breaks my heart that this is the world we have given them. And that children now have to think about what they would do and that those who hide may later question if they should have charged the shooter...that kids who are victims are also heroes and that more children have been shot in schools than police officers on duty or military serving overseas. Our world is all turned around and yet I still send my kids off to school each day believing they are safe, that it wont happen here...And I also know that its only a matter of time till another school is in the news and the story continues and yes, when will it be ours? Love you Greta and send you a big hug.
Posted by: Christy | 05/14/2019 at 10:16 AM