One time my sister and I were playing in a borrowed minivan when we were young. We were making a family trip to Tennessee where we would stay in a cabin for free: borrowed leaves, borrowed van, borrowed cabin. The van and cabin came from the generosity of our church congregation, the leaves came from nature and God.
When you’re small, little things like borrowed vans feel like the most exciting possibility and I felt excited to be in a vehicle more elegant than ours. Funny how quickly you learn to sense the luxury of some things over others when you are a kid without even realizing that the difference is money. We wedged ourselves between chairs and hopped off of the backseat and swung around in the way that youth propels you like elastic from enthusiasm to curiosity and back again. I pulled a small zipper pouch from the back pouch of the middle seat. It looked like something forgotten or in case of emergency only like bungie cords or a flashlight. Inside was a gun.
Suddenly the borrowed van seemed like less of a deal. What if I had shot myself or my sister? I think I was 9 so I was old enough to understand danger and young enough to make a terrible mistake. Luckily I didn’t do anything with it except bring it directly to my mom. I am nothing if not a rule follower.
A Thursday in November, 2019:
When we heard the voice of the principal “This is Principal T, this is a lockdown” my mentor teacher stood up from her desk and walked directly to the door. She ushered a few girls into the room who were in the hallway. Calmly, she said: “Okay everyone needs to get back against the wall. Please be quiet.” Where was the wall? Right next to where I sit at the edge of the prep/supplies table.
I closed my computer screen (I have no responsibilities during homeroom except that I am there to wait for 2nd period to begin). I looked around. Every single student had a cell phone in front of them. We were all in plain sight and if there was a shooter, which we were left to wonder, would we have been easy targets? Why did we go to the back of the room? Then I realized that maybe we were hiding behind each other. And that was better protection, and a scarier thought, than sitting at desks where we would be individual targets.
Just as we resettled into the quiet and the students were contentedly thumbing through Tik Tok or Instagram or I don’t know what on their phones, I heard a frantic shaking of our doorknob from outside. A student near me let out “asshole” and my mentor teacher made a face, not so much because of the term but because it was an interruption of silence (I think). To my left, that girl with the lollipop in her mouth stayed steady with the lollipop in her mouth. I’ve never seen her without a lollipop in her mouth. Apparently the monitors run around to check that all the doors are locked. Protocol.
After 10 minutes (or maybe less, silence is perhaps golden but it drags), we heard the voice of Principal T on the speaker:
Lockdown drill has been lifted.
Lockdown drill has been lifted.
Lockdown drill has been lifted.
He said “This lockdown drill is over and you can resume your class.”
Air filled my chest when he said “drill.”
We thought the drill was over. The students got back in their seats but we didn’t leave yet. Apparently we were supposed to wait for the email (but the students didn’t know that, or understand). Ostensibly a student, or anyone, could have forced the Principal to make that announcement so they add the email as an extra layer but the students don’t know that. Once the email was received, we were still supposed to wait for someone to come unlock our doors. One of the assistant principals came by looking jolly as usual as he opened our door. I wondered… why? I will tell you what, assistant principals are a perplexing breed. Who wrote “Assistant Principal” on their life vision boards when they were twelve? Okay why am I hating?
Anyway, as we sat in cell phone-engrossed silence, I looked around at the kids huddled against the back well just next to me and how they are, each and every one of them, someone’s baby. I thought about how this is “normal” but not at all normal.
We live in “this great nation” and we are scared we will get pumped full of lead. It happens all the time, every day, and with such lackadaisical gun restrictions, guns end up in the hands of the mentally ill (I am not blaming them for being mentally ill, but why was it so easy for them, for anyone, to find an AK-47)? I hate politics but I just don’t agree with how easy it is to get a weapon that can take a life. The argument that “criminals will always find guns” doesn’t make it any more clear to me why we should make them so mindlessly easy to get.
I didn’t grow up doing lockdown drills. The world has changed. Now I work in public service as a teacher (actually a student teacher so I don’t get paid) to be responsible to protect children if someone, heaven forbid, comes into the school with a gun. I say this honestly, and without a shred of guilt: I do not get paid enough to be in combat. And if it were what I signed up for, it would be one thing, but I didn’t: I want to teach. I didn’t know that was synonymous with lockdown drills.
But everything is uncertain and a school is an easy target for people who want to hurt the innocent.
This blog is about feeling foreign. Never have I felt more foreign in my own country than in a high school practicing how to hide for a possible worst case scenario. And if we want to exercise the right to have guns so casually, we further diminish our freedom to feel safe.
