Lock Down

I happened to be in a grade school recently when a practice lock down was ordered.  At first I didn’t know what was happening.  One minute I was passing out juice, the next the teacher had locked the door and turned off the lights.  All the kids piled into a corner and sat down.  Even I was expected to sit on the floor making as little noise as possible.We remained like that for half an hour.  I timed it because the clock was right in front of me and couldn’t do much else.  For half an hour those kids were remarkably quiet.  In the time I did some thinking.

The purpose of a lock down is to give our kids the best chance of survival should someone in the school decide to become a mass murderer.

Once I realized this it struck me hard.  My kids stand a chance of facing a kid or other intruder with a gun in their own schools.  It’s a real threat.  It might be more of a real threat than those silly “duck and cover” drills we did when I was in school.  Not the ones for tornadoes, the ones for nuclear bombs.

Later the same day I was driving my daughter somewhere while she was on my cell phone talking to my mother and noticed half a dozen people we passed also had cell phones glued to their heads.  There was a guy walking down the street who looked silly with the tiny thing in his hand next to his crew cut.  There was the guy with a cell phone in one hand and a weed whacker in the other.  There were too many people in cars with cell phones wedged between one hand and an ear.  It struck me that people aren’t even fully aware of the world they are passing through when they have one of those things to their ear.  How different the way we think now.

Am I off base here?  Am I being too esoteric?  Has the world really changed so much, or is it just more of the same?