I’d never seen my civics teacher exit the classroom as much as she did on December 14th. Her husband’s room was just across the hall and she would often visit while he was teaching. It became a running joke — having a class with either meant a slice of your 40 minute lesson would be interrupted by their chats.
As far as school days go, the middle of December is as easy as it gets. With the holiday break right around the corner, teachers generally give up on teaching and let kids have study halls. Study halls, for me, meant not studying…at all. Instead, I used that time to try and make my friends laugh. I was in the back right corner of the room, sitting in that cold and unforgiving chair, joking around with three other kids when I looked up and saw her take out her phone. An ‘oh my god’ escaped out of her mouth, quietly.
She got up and hastily walked across the hall. I’d seen her make that trip many times before and it was unmistakable that something was different this time. While it did strike me as concerning, with no further information I went back to laughing. No one else seemed to notice. She returned a few minutes later. They say you should look at a flight attendent to see if the turbulance is anything to worry about. The idea is that the cabin crew have seen it all before and are so steady, unless something truly perilous is happening, their confidence and steadfast expression will give you peace. The problem is; what do you do when the person you look to for reassurance is crying?
The details were arriving sporadically. At this point everyone was either looking at their phone or purposefully avoiding doing so. School shooting. Five dead.
Eight.
Twelve.
Fifteen.
Every few minutes she’d run out again, more emotionally undone than the last time. We would all find out later that the deadliest elementary school shooting in US history happened that day. In the moment there wasn’t any thought to where the day ranked on a list on Wikipedia — everyone in that room was thinking the same thing: there is someone killing children, right now, and they’re only 40 minutes away.
I remember how trapped I felt. School isn’t a place I loved but it was a place where I knew I was safe. The math changes when you are keenly aware someone purposefully sought out a school, sought out kids, and denied them the future they were on their way to meet.
There’s no way to properly handle a day like that, especially as a teenager. My friends and I tried to keep things relatively normal for a while, by distracting ourselves with dumb jokes. At a certain point though, the reality of a rising body count overtook whatever coping mechanism we were utilizing. Grief, fear, hopelessness…all at once. The tragedy is so great that emotions can’t really be grasped, they’re just floating around in your head and heart like these competing all-consuming blobs. There isn’t room for a lot else.
Nothing felt the same after that Friday. How are you supposed to enjoy the weekend when 20 of your peers and 6 of their teachers got killed?
The powers at be decided to hire a police officer to sit in his cop car every day as buses dropped students off. We started doing active shooter drills several times a month. Sandy Hook might’ve only been a day but it stayed in our heads — there’s no scrubbing off that trapped and scared feeling. My sister started having severe anxiety attacks at school. Any loud noise, any PA announcement could trigger an adrenal rush. The first thought in my head was always “there’s a shooter in the building, you’re going to die, your friends are going to die.”
I saw the new Spiderman in theaters a couple months ago. 15 minutes into the movie the lights came on and an alarm went off. The first thing that popped into my head: “someone’s got a gun, where is the exit, we need to run.” There’s no undoing that.
Anyone in school during the Cold War era will tell you about the ‘duck and cover’ drills they would perform in order to prepare for nuclear holocaust. I won’t deny the anxiety that must come from the constant threat of nuclear war, but I will say there’s something far more chilling about the idea that anyone at any time could decide to end your life or the lives of your loved ones.
Nuclear war is a possibility, a hypothetical. We’ve never seen it. There have been 27 school shootings and 212 mass shootings this year.
There’s a paradoxical comfort baked into the idea of nuclear war — no one’s surviving and everyone goes at the same time. It’s like a non-discriminatory rapture. But the second an alarm goes off in an American school, kids are looking around and doing horrific calculations: “if the shooter comes into this room I might be dead or I might live and five of my friends might die instead.” The loneliness in it — the tragedy in the thought of having your own future taken, or the tragedy in the thought of having to outlive a friend.
It’s not just a thought for an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. May 24, 2022, 19 children killed, and two teachers. Over 500 students go to that school. Hundreds of kids that will never be the same. 19 will never be anymore at all.
It’s been 10 years since Sandy Hook. We’re in the same spot, the same headlines, the same talking points, the same inaction. The irony of my December 14th, 2012…sitting in the very classroom where I’d learn the idealized version of how democracy works, how America works, only to understand in the years that followed a painful and sobering truth; our democracy is not working, America is broken. When the children die and nothing is done, what hope can we have? The future is being killed every day, and all we can do is stare at our screens and watch.
