Dispatch from the Front Lines

Yesterday we had another Lock Down.

I teach seniors. Counting me, we had 31 humans huddled in our safety corner.

For those who have never been in charge of a classroom full of teenagers in such a moment of potential peril, a safety corner is the corner of the room in which a shooter couldn’t see you if they looked through the window by the door.

At the announcement of the Lock Down, my students silently closed their books and huddled tightly into the safety corner, just as they have done since their bodies were much smaller – under desks, sitting on laps of friends, crouching behind the filing cabinets.

I did what I always do, consider the best place for me to be ready to swing a chair at a shooter if they get the door open. Then I saw the email that it was a drill. I let the chair go and told my kids it was a drill and that they were doing a great job.

Some of my kids have lived in refugee camps. Most of them have lost friends to gun violence. They all lost a classmate last year in a suicide made much too easy by a gun meant for home defense.

We grown-ups are failing them.

After the drill ended, we went back to our seats in seminar circle and continued our discussion of a short story about being locked in a broken system, trying to cling to compassion and humanity.

This the day after a memorial service for a man who was ok with sacrificing our children on the altar of unchecked gun rights. A man whose last words were suggesting that lives lost in gang violence don’tcount. His widow was announced at his WWE-style stadium memorial service with pyrotechnics before comparing her husband – who said empathy was a weakness – to Jesus Christ. Jesus. Christ.

In the discussion, my students mostly agreed that the story we were discussing points out the truth that the only way to maintain your humanity in a broken system is to love the people around you… and that advocacy and protest just lead to more suffering. Not change.

As the white man in the room, I held myself back from saying some hokey hopeful bullshit.

We grown-ups are failing them.

It is not too late for our generation to stand up, but almost. First we have to tell the truth.

It is the guns. It is a genocide. It is fascism.