Skimming an article online from NPR, about two middle school girls who have a podcast about what it's like to be a middle schooler today, one thing stood out: active shooter drills.
When I was in the middle school years, the Vietnam War and racial tension stressed the country. As a military dependent, I knew a lot of kids who worried about losing a father. Outside of that circle, with the draft in full operation, I knew kids who worried about losing a brother. Hanging over all of this was the threat of nuclear war. None of us as young children had any idea what might trigger it, but we all knew that it would be much more abrupt and far reaching than the start of any other war in human history. But it was abstract. When a kid lost a family member to the war in Southeast Asia, it was on the other side of the world. Their loss was real, but the carnage took place off stage.
For the past thirty years or so, school children have had to prepare more and more for the carnage to erupt in the middle of their lives. With gun laws that are not only lax but openly supportive of the rights of the homicidal, the United States is a breeding ground for grievance murderers. Most of it happens piecemeal, in domestic violence or street crime. Applying the logic used around air crashes, you never hear about the thousands of schools that go year after year without a mass shooting. You only hear about the spectacular disasters. We're just supposed to accept the possibility. Could happen. Probably won't. And hey: your odds of survival are way better in a school shooting than in an airliner crash. Do your drills and keep your wits about you if the shooting actually starts. You fall to the level of your training, kids!
Mass shootings are not limited to schools, of course. Any public gathering could become a target range for some heavily armed, sad, angry person ready to let it rip. They might or might not be suicidal themselves. Often they have no intention of surviving, or at least don't expect to.
Death hovered near us in other ways in the 1960s and '70s. Schoolmates might lose a parent to cancer or a car crash. We might even lose a schoolmate to cancer or a car crash. One kid I knew drowned in a swimming pool. Those still apply today. The unlikely but far from impossible threat of a nuclear fireball (I spent a lot of school years near DC) has been replaced by the fairly unlikely but too-often repeated scenario of a mass murderer dropping by, in addition to the daily hazards. Does it make it harder or easier to take that you might be chopped to pieces by little bits of flying lead while a nearby friend manages to evade it? It's not even combat. You're being hunted by a wasteful killer with nothing but blood lust.
In the meantime, you have to worry about whether you look sufficiently fashionable to avoid ridicule, and hope that you don't do anything that will get you plastered all over the internet for decades of unanswerable humiliation. And an older generation grumbles constantly about your flaws.
