“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
- from “A Few Page of Notes” by H.L. Mencken, 1915
“Schools are still like prisons, because we don’t learn how to live
Everybody wants to take, nobody wants give…”
- from “Presidential Rag” by Arlo Guthrie, 1974
Get ready for the U.S. Department of Schoolyard Security.
The people are demanding the end of school shootings, as the undertaker can no longer keep up with orders. You know how this is going to end. Remember the would-be shoe-bomber? Until the end of our lives we’ll have to take off our shoes at airports because some idiot tried to make his loafer explode.
Now the good parents of the victims of the Parkland shooting are demanding that our people in Washington, D.C. protect students from being randomly executed.
This is what they are going to get: An extension of Donald Trump’s Mexico wall that surrounds every school, with a drawbridge and a moat full of hungry crocodiles and turrets on the corners with machine guns facing into the schoolyard and two or three TSA inspectors going through your kid’s backpack, then a walk through the body scanner, and, “Hey kid, remember: No liquids. You can’t be bringing that chocolate milk in here. Just dump it there outside the door…”
This will be the upshot of Parkland, just as surely as the upshot to domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was the armament of federal buildings nationwide. “We’re going to beef up security,” or in the edgier parlance of the day, “We need to harden the target.”
Watch for it.
We will not start arming teachers. Besides the idea’s patent absurdity and inherent hazards, teachers have unions that will demand extra pay for doing actual police work, and Republicans will balk at that.
We will not stop the easy sale of assault-type weapons. Too many U.S. senators and congressmen are on the take here, plus too much money is at stake. Shoot-’em-up-bang-bang is good business, from manufacturing all the way down to the corner gun store.
No, what we’re going to do is take the public’s money and use it to rebuild our schools into super-fortresses. School lockers? They’ll be gone by this time next year, the same way public lockers disappeared from train stations and airports in the wake of Sept. 11. School identification cards? You’ll need to insert one into a slot to get in the building. Student drop-off zones? Experts will determine they are dangerous “points of vulnerability.” Cameras will be everywhere.
This insanity will be blessed by a holy crusade to “protect the children.” People who dare to question it will be vilified as insensitive or ignorant. Nothing trumps the testimony of a grieving mother or father whose child has been slaughtered, or a child whose classmate has. And the mothers and fathers and classmates are saying, in unison: Just protect the children.
This will go the wrong way. It has gone the wrong way before and it will go the wrong way again. The Chinese built their Great Wall. Donald Trump wants his own great wall. Many people in the country – particularly in Florida, site of the recent slaughter – already live in gated communities. Why not gated public schools?
This will be the chosen alternative because it costs politicians nothing and citizens everything. Citizens will pay more in taxes for the new fortifications. The efficiency of public schools will decline due to required security procedures. Students, locked in a cage, will begin behaving like animals — either wolves or sheep.
Another reason this will happen: It’s the American way. As a culture, we look first toward technology to solve problems. Headache? Take a pill. Illegal immigrants? Build a wall. Got a problem? Pull a trigger on it.
Another time that citizens rose up to address a national drunkenness like this came during the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s. With President Reagan’s aides discussing “winnable nuclear war,” citizens demanded an end to it, including a “freeze” in the production of nuclear weapons. Simple enough.
Reagan defused the movement by proposing “Star Wars,” a futuristic weapons system located in space that would shoot down incoming enemy missiles. The media took the bait. The missile defense shield is a fallacy. Described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” it has never worked. But it did its most important job – defanging public outcry about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In the same way, fortressing schools will work – to end the outcry over school shootings, with little or no effect on mass shooting deaths.
P.S. One day after the above essay was posted, the Ketchikan Daily News published a piece by syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro under the headline, “We have to do something.” In the column, Shapiro wrote: “We should also radically increase security in schools.” Describing the high school he attended, he wrote: “Every student who attends that school is now checked in by security; the school has barriers on every side; armed security guards attend the campus. The same measures should be available at every public school.”