Published: The Huffington Post 2010-11-22
Last week I got a robo call on the cell phone from my school district. They had an emergency drill! They were happy. They felt the need to interrupt everyone's day to tell the world that they sent trained police dogs into the high school to sniff out lockers. They were soooo proud they found nothing.
(I don't think the administrators have noticed that none of the kids use their lockers anymore for fear of drug sniffing dogs. The tip-off should have come when they would see kids with chiropractic problems lugging 60 pound backpacks everywhere. But, that will be our little secret.)
And they had a lockdown drill too! They just couldn't contain themselves as they told the parents they were training our kids in case of a terrorist break-in in suburbia!
As the media goes nuts with the "Don't Touch My Junk" guy, I think we have reached the stage where we have to talk, as a society, about the Fear Jail we have placed ourselves in.
Can anyone say we are the Land of the Free anymore when we allow TSA agents to grope us in the name of some sort of secure utopia? When commenting on this, I was really blown away by a guy online telling me, "What's the big deal, it's just like getting arrested." I am really sorry, but, I think the reason we had (note the past tense) an amendment about illegal search and seizure was to address a government police state playing either "Cop-a-Feel" or "Scan-UR-Boobs."
Can we say we are the Home of the Brave anymore when we teach our kids to cower in a classroom as part of a drill? Seriously, that is what the schools are teaching our kids. To sit down, hide, and be afraid. Be very afraid. "Hey, someone is coming into your school with a gun to hunt all of you down. Here is what you do. Hide in the corner of your classroom at an off-angle to the door so the shooter won't see you." Yes, it is cowering when you all line up against a door so some 21st Century Angel of Death can pass through your high school halls.
These kids are being trained to think someone is coming to kill them! How can train kids to hold Freedom dear when they are trained to be afraid of everything?
I got some news for the cowards that pass themselves off as Americans Educational Administrators. If someone is breaking in to your little suburban fortress to kill people, they are going to know exactly where they are going. They will have a clue as to which classroom they are going. Stacking the kids together in one corner of the room only makes it easier for them to kill more kids at once. If you have someone crazy enough to break in with weapons, they know they aren't getting out. They will be trying to take as many people with them as possible. Grouping people together just makes the lunatics' jobs easier.
This grouping also prevents anyone from standing up to these would be terrorists; you know maybe an act of bravery by some kid? Have any of you administrators ever taken a look at what happened at Pearl Harbor? The airplanes were all grouped together. The Japanese took them out quickly. Had those planes been spread out, there would have been more resistance to the attack that day.
But that would fly in the face of everything schools teach. A Japanese proverb that every nail that sticks up will be hammered down is the effective mandate.
Gone is the real individualism of what we think or thought America was. How are we teaching our kids to question authority? What would happen if a kid actually questioned why we need to be prepared for a Red Dawn style attack on our schools? How do our institutions react to questions they can't answer? How many times has a Columbine tragedy occurred in the last decade? What does it tell our kids when we need to fear something that is statistically minuscule? What perspective are we giving these young adults as they venture in to the world?
The scariest thing is these kids cannot define Freedom.
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