When I went up to my mother to show her what I learned in school today, she was shocked to see a photo of a dimly lit room with stacks of chairs and desks barricading the door.
“What has our world come to?” she scoffed, before going back to dinner.
I asked myself the same question as I stared at the ALICE video being played before my eyes. Alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate–an acronym being taught to me like an English teacher teaching FANBOYS. A man calmly urging me to break windows and build barricades if we were in danger, students chucking textbooks and taking down a man three times their age; I wondered if it would all be so simple if it wasn’t just a simulation.
After the video ended, I laughed along with my peers at the absurdity, continuing to do so as we discussed seemingly fantastical situations of what we’d do if met with the danger face to face. However, there was a sense of looming dread in me, one built up from the surrealness of our reality. It all felt so unserious as a hypothetical, but the whole reason why we were being taught this is because, to many, these situations weren’t just hypothetical–they were real.
And I began to think how surreal it is that we live in a world where our schools must teach us how to properly barricade a door that opens out rather than in, a world where my teachers are instructing me on how to properly break and jump out of a window, a world where I’m taught to always be alert and looking at my peers in the hallway just in case one of them may be carrying a pistol in their pocket. It’s surreal that I’m given hypotheticals asking me what I would do if I tried to escape the building, but there was a chain and lock on the doors, asking me if I should stay or run if there was a person with a weapon within walking distance of me.
Suddenly, I’m being taught to look at everything in the rooms I’m in as a potential distraction or barrier to someone’s entry. Tissue boxes become projectiles and I wonder if I should wear belts more often in case I need them as a makeshift rope to lock the door. I’m laughing with peers about what room would be the best equipped to face a lockdown–half light-heartedly, half wondering if I would still be laughing if I was faced with a man holding a gun to my face.
We play out these situations like a choose-your-own adventure game where every choice is ours. But the other hallmark catchphrase of these games is the notion that every choice you make matters. In a situation where my life is at stake, I’m being taught to question: would I make the right one?
I don’t oppose bringing in these measures to protect ourselves; rather, I cannot believe that they are necessary. Is this truly the world that our forefathers envisioned? A world where schools can’t be trusted as a safe space for your child’s education, where you have to reassess every pop you hear just in case it’s a gunshot, where you drop off your child at school every day just hoping they’ll come back safe?
What I do know is that this is not the America my parents envisioned when they moved here to give us a better life. We’re living in a world that can’t protect us, so we must learn how to protect ourselves.
We are living in a dystopia; this is not the land of the free, we’re living in a land of fear.
