Kindergarten students lie on the floor during a classroom lockdown drill in
Oahu, Hawaii. (photo: Phil Mislinski/Getty Images)
Kids'
Questions on a Lockdown Planet
By Frida Berrigan,
TomDispatch
24 December 15
What
did you do at school today, Seamus?" It’s a question I ask him every day.
"Well,"
my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill
today." And that’s about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes
I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi"
(Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my
precocious three year old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown
drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a
parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller
picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began, she says,
Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library. Amid the
clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two
teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and
hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth
and cried the entire time.
"Does
he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"It’s
as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He
talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She
informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains
easily startled long after they’re over, running for shelter between an
adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At
that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I just
couldn’t square my son’s loving exuberance and confidence in the people around
him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed
killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all, do you
practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that’s been on my mind since I
was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently
with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine, so proud to
share his classroom with them.
"At
home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control,
Not Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add,
"It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this
trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons.
He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible.
He shouldn’t have to practice surviving a mass killing episode at one of his
favorite places in the whole wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they
just keep coming.
Our
kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists.
Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly
demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His
teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I
cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her
cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No,
no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns.
"It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to
practice for this kind of thing."
Thinking
the Unthinkable
I
wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not quite
irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven
into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents' generation
had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck
and cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and
cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions
about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be
terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came
to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental
ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and
witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers. We
would stand in front of the Pentagon -- this was in the late
1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with slogans like "You
can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a fallout shelter
printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a
world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of
them.
Imagine
how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These
days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry
remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus’s generation? And what about our
present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century whys?
Assuming
there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are),
that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and
destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this "God-given,
constitutionally enshrined right," my son does need to endure more
lockdown drills.
The
consensus of school security experts is certainly that the
massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut
(only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and
teachers hadn't been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck
on December 14, 2012.
But
how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me?
When it makes no sense, period?
Why?
Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My
parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of
our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a
UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where
I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the
mark) statistics about how children throughout the
world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over
the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay
the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My
parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely
destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television,
except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less
bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, "Why no
TV?" and always get the same answer. “Because it teaches racism, sexism,
and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the
way of your own imagination and creativity.”
So
instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we
watched black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected
onto our living room wall. I couldn’t tell you about the latest plot twists
on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong.
Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were
etched into my young brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young
anti-nuclear activists. Sadako
Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic
bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace
before dying at the age of 12.Samantha
Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov
with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where
she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age
of 13.
I
wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the
anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young
martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists’ Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want
to pass on to the next generation. I guess I’m happy that they don’t know what
nuclear weapons are (yet) and it’s one more thing I’m not looking forward to
explaining to them.
The
questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only
going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as best we
-- I -- can. It’s a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain,
educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of
ours, and it’s a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But
if we don’t, others surely will. In these early years, our
kids turn to us first, but if we can’t or won’t answer their questions, how
long will they keep asking them?
Why do
we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are
all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?
“Why
Do the Police Kill People?”
At
some preschools, it’s protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing
in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a
stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow,
and I can’t tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth.
At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they
do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and
"keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the
month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown
drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San
Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read
the news about healthcare offices and social service
agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code
over granola and yogurt. It’s as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve
into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.
Still,
it’s strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of
our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee
crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantánamo and climate change. We usually
welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better
at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip
into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After
the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New
London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the
kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all
Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of
course, by "Are they going to kill me?"
Then we somehow had to
explain white privilege to a three year old and how the very
things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority
-- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to
keep them from getting killed by police.
And
then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I’m
sure we’ll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying
desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for
such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it
came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to
our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police
officer.
And
then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn’t think sooner or later that
the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, “Because it’s
nuts! And we’re nuts!” I mean, really, where have we ended up when our
answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And
then, of course, there’s the anxiety I have about how he’ll take in any of this
and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the
ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new
words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My
stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little
kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped
its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and
caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened.
For five and six year olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation,
nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre.
(Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested
responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to
sit tight and hope our kids didn’t get enough information to formulate a why.
Good
luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No
news, sit tight, and pretend nothing’s going on. After all, like so many of our
present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in
their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don’t
exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three
years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically
under attack, yes?
Unlike
so many people on this planet, we don’t live in a war zone (if you put aside
the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures
on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids
are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of
my own car any day of the week, right?
Of
course, there’s another problem lurking here and it’s mine. I’m not there. My
three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I’m not there to walk him
through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are
preparing him for. They couldn’t be creepier. They’re a reminder not just to
our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be
living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according
to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed
by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were
killed in
Afghanistan.
Some
Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is
the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find
out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue
light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever,
because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs don't work any
more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at
least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.
The
problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy
Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of
humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best
we can in this truly confusing world.
And
keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never stop
asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is
always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well,
largely unanswered.
Why
this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why?
Why?
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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