Vol. 70 - Active Shooter

On feeling helpless

Late last week, my son’s new school opened their doors to parents of rising kindergartners for a new-student orientation. A few days later, the school would be kicking off another new year.

As I was a few hours west, enjoying my own orientation for a new job teaching at a university, Emily was at our son’s orientation alone.

Before we went our separate ways in the morning, we covered things we wanted to be sure to have information and/or answers on. There was lunchtime and pickup/dropoffs, general preparedness issues, and some notes about school supplies. On my way to Winston-Salem, I realized I forgot to tell Emily one last thing: to ask the teachers how the school handled active shooter drills. And so I called her and ask that she include that in her short list of questions.

I hate that I had to ask her. I hate that she had to ask his teacher. I hate that it’s become so commonplace in America that our babies know exactly how to stay as safe as possible during a murderous rampage. Like so many other reasonably minded Americans, I fucking hate that almost nothing is being done to prevent these tragedies going forward. I seethe with anger that we’re putting the onus onto our kids and our school teachers, who we already drastically underpay and massively overburden. I hate that anyone suggests arming teachers, even though a number of us don’t trust them with choosing their own books.

After the orientation, a few other parents thanked Emily for asking such a fraught question, one several of them admitted they didn’t want to ask themselves for whatever reason.

It’s a necessary question to ask, covering information regarding an event I thought might happen to us, given the stupefying frequency with which this happens in America.

“I didn’t think it could happen here” is one of the most ignorant responses of the twenty-first century.

It can happen here. But I didn’t think it would happen so fast.

Because here I sit, tied to my desk, furiously refreshing my browser for updates as my son is spending his first day of school on lockdown, as there is currently an active shooter somewhere on campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I write because I don’t know what else to do. It beats watching the news, as Emily is, tears streaming down her cheeks, both of us helpless to do anything to help our children (quite unlike our elected officials). I beats cooking, cleaning, or making jokes, which are my other methods of dealing with stress.

Our town in bisected by UNC. Our home is on one side of campus. Our son’s new school is on the other.

And so now, between us and our son are what look like—at least from the local news report currently on our television—a hundred police cars, dozens officers arming themselves with high-powered rifles and pulling on tactical gear, and a handful of fire rescue and ambulance vehicles.

I don’t know what to think or feel right now other than hopeless, helpless fear. Fear and anger, because we continue to do absolutely nothing other than hope and pray that it doesn’t happen to us. Because it’s going to happen. That much is true. But maybe, if we’re lucky, it’ll happen to someone else.

From the looks of it, our kids are safe. Why else would dozens of police cars be posted outside a single building? The shooter must be in there, far(ish) from our babies, and surrounded on all sides by heavily armed police and law enforcement. Still, this feeling of helplessness, the knowledge that I can’t get to my babies, is tearing a hole into me.

It’s unlikely my kids know what’s happening and so it’s unlikely they’re frightened. My son is five and it’s his first day at a new school. He has little concept of time and no concept of what to expect in his new kindergarten. If he were still in preschool, he might feel that something was amiss when the three-o’clockers' weren’t dismissed to their parents after a certain point in the day.

Our daughter is only two and thus has even less of a concept of the horror gripping our normally idyllic little university town. She’s likely playing happily with her classmates and her teachers.

And again, I think of the teachers and I wonder where their babies are and how they’re holding it together while they care for my babies. And I think of all we expect of them. Too much. Far too much.

One of the most prescient pieces of parenting advice I’ve ever gotten came from my father, who advised me shortly before my son was born to enjoy the last few worry-free weeks of my life.

“For as long as you live, you’ll be worried about him,” he said. He went further, explaining that he still worried about me every day, even though I was, at the time, thirty-five years old and hadn’t lived under his care in nearly two decades. He explained that he would do so every day for the rest of his life.

And over the last five years, my father’s point proved correct. I worry about my son every minute of every day. And since my daughter arrived, that worry has doubled. It’s not a paralyzing worry. But it’s worry nonetheless.

I worry about little things like their comfort. I worry about big things like injuries. I worry about the emotional and psychological dings and dents I might unknowingly inflict on them because sometimes I’m impatient or too angry.

I worry about school shootings because I’m a parent in 2023 and the horrible reality is that we’re never far from the next one.

I worry that it might happen here because it absolutely can happen here because it happens fucking everywhere.

I just didn’t think it’d happen on his very first day of school.