Drupelets

Today when I picked up Button, our seventh-grader, from school, she told me, "Tomorrow we're going to have a lockdown."

I spent the next several moments lost in confusion. The only place I've heard the word lockdown used is in TV shows and movies about prison, when there's a riot or a breakout. It's not a word I associate with junior high school—or ever want to. The image of kids locked in behind barred windows is too disturbing.

So I asked her what she meant. She said a state trooper was coming to explain what they should do if there's a threat in the school. The state police wanted every school to practice.

I'm having to forcibly censor myself, to keep from going into a Maddox-style rant of profanity. But the insanity, the complete inappropriateness, the sheer censored misguidedness of rehearsing a lockdown at Button's school simply infuriates me.

We live in the Ozarks, in Middle America—not East L.A., not Washington, D.C. Button does not go to some run-down inner-city school where the kids have learned how to smuggle butterfly knives past the metal detectors. She goes to a small, quiet junior high with only about 350 students. There has never been a shooting, a knifing, a clubbing—any assault at all more serious than childish fistfights—in the history of the school.

But it's just a few weeks since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings (and Newtown, Connecticut isn't exactly the ghetto, either, I have to admit) and nearly everyone seems to think: I must do something to make our kids safer.

Nevertheless I can't help thinking, Stop terrorizing my children!

Life isn't safe. But there are much likely dangers than somebody invading Button's school. The way some of the other parents drive, I think she's in far more danger walking across the parking lot. I drive a Honda Fit, one of the smallest cars Honda sells in America, and I sometimes have trouble maneuvering in the crowded lot. Yet every day I see some happy idiot sailing through at twenty or twenty-five, ignoring the marked lanes and speed bumps, often talking on the phone as well. I'm not the least worried—not in the slightest bit—that someone is going to shoot up Button's school. But I'm way worried that one of these cretins is going to clip Button with her Lincoln Navigator.

Life isn't safe. I teach my girls this. I talk to them about common dangers and how to avoid them. Bug and Button wear seat belts. They don't eat spoiled food. They stay out of strangers' cars. They look and listen before they cross the street. They don't play with matches. They get flu vaccinations. They don't smoke or do drugs. (I sincerely believe this last, at least so far—but I also teach them about the dangers of peer pressure.)

Life isn't safe. Things can go wrong in the blink of an eye, and I never hide that from my girls. But that doesn't mean we should rehearse for every conceivable threat. I don't teach my girls to worry about someone coming into their school with a gun, just as I don't teach them to worry about falling sperm whales or drifting clouds of chlorine gas. In this part of the country, they're in more danger of being caught in a serious earthquake than a school shooting.

I'm tired of the culture of terror that's arisen in the U.S. If I'd had somewhere to go (and if the FAA had allowed it) I would have climbed onto an airliner on September 12, 2001 with no more fear than on September 10. Today, I'm far less afraid of terrorists on a plane than I am of being arrested by the TSA for my bad attitude. But the prevailing attitude in the media—and in many people I know—is that if it happened anywhere, once, it could happen here, tomorrow. So we must protect ourselves!

I'm a little afraid every time I get behind the wheel of a car, because I've been in two serious collisions in my life, Morgan has been in another, and I've only missed several others by great good luck, good reactions, and the nimbleness of the little cars I drive. Nearly every day I watch some idiot blatantly run a red light; I had a very near miss just a couple of months ago. In the U.S., the number of people killed annually in car collisions is still in the tens of thousands, despite improved airbags and annual increases in seat belt use. The risk is real.

So I drive carefully, and I wear a seat belt.

But the number of people in the U.S. killed by terrorism in the last century is still only several thousand—most of those in a single, unlikely-to-ever-repeat cluster of actions.

I might as well take precautions against tiger attacks as against terrorists.

I'm a subscriber to Bruce Schneier's attitude that "if it's in the news, don't worry about it." For the average person, it's the things that are so common that they don't make headlines, like car wrecks and influenza, that are the real dangers. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 160,000 people died of lung cancer in 2012 alone; that's the population of Springfield, Missouri—and nearly all of those deaths were from a preventable cause. So where are the headlines saying, 3000 Americans Killed by Lung Cancer in 1 Week?

The headlines don't show the real risks—they show the dramatic ones.

When you teach children about risks, look at where the real risks lie. If you live in desert country, teach them about heat stroke and flash floods; if you live on the bayou, teach them about water moccasins and drowning; if you live in a big city, teach them about burglars and bicycle messengers.

But don't teach your kid to watch for tsunamis if you live in Kansas City. Children have enough to fear without being terrorized by the latest improbable boogeyman from the headlines. If you teach them to guard against even the wildest improbability, you teach them that there's no foundation to their world.

A child who really, truly believes, "Any day now someone will come into my school and start shooting people," is not that far from believing, "Any day now, an asteroid will hit the earth," or just, "Any day now, the sun won't come up." And if the world's that dangerous every day, why worry about a little extra risk from smoking crack or shoplifting jewelry? Why worry about getting AIDS or getting pregnant?

A child who never learns to make realistic judgments about risk can't make realistic judgments about benefits, either. "Any day now, I'll win the million-dollar lottery." So how is she supposed to decide whether spending four hard years getting a college degree is a wise choice? Where does she learn the skill to decide between the fast-talking dude with a Camaro and no brain and the hard-working guy with an old clunker and a scholarship to MIT? How will she understand that getting a thirty-year mortgage instead of paying monthly rent can actually make sense?

Life isn't safe. When you teach my girls about a real risk, you help them stay safer. But when you make them take precautions against something that has Irish Sweepstakes odds of ever happening to them, you teach them that every danger is equally great—or that every danger is equally meaningless.

Labels: Children, Having a Moan

# posted by Dru @ 21:50