ATROCITIES BEYOND DISSOCIATION

 

Where will you hide when it happens? It almost feels inevitable now, and not a day goes by when I don’t analyze a classroom and figure out how to best protect myself if our campus were to become victim to the next mass shooting.

It’s not that I feel like schools aren’t doing a good enough job at protecting students, but instead the fact that people in positions of power in the U.S. government keep looking for every possible reason these tragedies are happening, but refuse to admit that the actual common factor is easy access to guns, and in a lot of cases that’s combined with white male privilege and entitlement.

That being said, I’m not here to get into the nitty-gritty of politics, gun control, or to begin to act like I’m an expert when it comes to making big legal changes.

I am an expert in fear and over-thinking when it comes to safety, however.

It started in high school. School shootings were growing more frequent, and I was more in tune with what was happening outside of my own little bubble of the world.

The last semester of my senior year of high school (2016), in a span of 48 hours, I heard two shooting threats stated aloud by students in my classes. I and several classmates reported them and those students’ home lives were looked into. One returned to school, the other never did, to my knowledge, but I never really felt safe after that despite my principal meeting with me to talk about safety as much as I needed.

When I sat in the school hallway doing homework, it was like clockwork planning what I would do if I heard gunfire or if we went under lockdown. My solution? Hide in a trash can. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s how thoroughly I’ve thought about these hypothetical scenarios.

I don’t feel the same stress at Mt. Hood that I felt in high school, but the thoughts and anxieties are still very real. I move more quickly passing through the courtyards, and don’t care to be around the center of campus much. I want to be thankful for classrooms with windows looking out to the beautiful scenery, but instead feel too exposed.

This shouldn’t be our normal.

I want to go back and volunteer at my high school, but the fear of what could happen prevents me from doing so. I want my elementary school-age cousins to spend their time learning and making friends instead of trying to understand why someone would want to come into their classroom and hurt them.

This shouldn’t be our normal.

It’s why I can never become desensitized to these tragedies. They will always hit close to home even when they’re states away because I never feel fully safe on a school campus – knowing a mass shooting can happen anywhere – and because I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

This shouldn’t be our normal.

Previous generations practiced how to duck-and-cover in the event of nuclear war, but now we’re all practicing for how to hide from being killed by people from our own communities.

This shouldn’t be our normal.

To all of you reading this, who have run lock-down drills in your mind every day outside of the required ones, you are not alone. This shouldn’t be our normal, but it’s important that we talk about it because we’re never alone in our fears, it turns out.