It makes struggling to get evolution in the curriculum seem a bit irrelevant.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It makes struggling to get evolution in the curriculum seem a bit irrelevant.
The one true American exceptionalism.
Christ on a crutch.
That is absolutely terrifying. The American journalist Chris Hedges says that the USA is a profoundly violent country but that is obscene.
Yet one more reason I do not feel bad about choosing not to have children, but one more reason I fear for my nieces and nephews futures.
Raise kids in fear, it’s easier to give them a uniform and a gun and go fuck someone up in the name of the USA.
Maybe let every member on every level of Congress (federal/state) attend one or more of these sessions before they’re sworn in. Do you think they would get it then?
Vision got blurry there for a bit. Must be old age.
This brings up memories: going to high school in the 90s and getting school assemblies after Thurston and Columbine. Twenty years later and we haven’t done a fucking thing to try and fix the problem, just told people they have to live with it.
It does indeed.
My memories are different though.
We grew up during the Duck and Cover days of the cold war, 50’s and 60’s.
The USSR and USA were in a nuclear arms race and a nuclear war was thought to be all too possible.
We lived near a lot of military bases, including a Trident nuclear missile submarine base.
We knew we were going to be targeted first.
After the nuclear exchange, we were supposed to go home, gather supplies for camping out, and wait for our parents to come home and drive us into the mountains along the marked evacuation routes.
To wait for the fallout to die down and someone to restart civilization, I guess.
There was nothing on our list for what to do if our parents didn’t come home because they had been vaporized in a nuclear explosion.
This is what we call “normalisation”, right? Trying to gain a sense of control and order by building rituals and social conventions around events outside of your control. School shootings may be terrible, sure, but they’re an accepted, understood, “managed” part of life.
It’s a pretty good indication that no-one in charge expects the killing to stop.
I was a high school freshman when the Columbine massacre took place. The school-shooter drills started the next year, though they were nowhere near as elaborate as they are today. I still vividly remember when, maybe a week or two after Columbine, someone scrawled a threat to shoot up the school on the wall of the men’s room. The next day, only 20-30 students showed up out of the entire 6-12th grade student body.
The public high school I attended was falling apart. The auditorium and gym were literally unusable by the time I would have graduated from there (I went to a private school my last two and half years), so my graduation year had to use a local church instead. Money that would have been used to repair the school buildings was instead spent on metal detectors, remote locking doors, and a bullet-proof glass cubical for the front door monitor to sit in.
Can there be anything more obscene than having to give innocent children “Active Shooter” lessons?
As a Brit I can’t get my head around that.
You know what is even more fucked up that not changing your laws?
In Italy we decided that the US is an example to follow.
As a German born 1960, all that stuff was pretty theoretical to me – until 1980 (age 20) and my 18 months draft, to the Luftwaffe. Everyone there has two official jobs (not as much personnel as the army; the Luftwaffe had about one noncom per (drafted) private), and my second job was to be ABC (english usually NBC) protection. They showed us a number of relevant films.
I had nightmares for weeks, I was afraid to go to sleep sometimes.
Fortunately, it died down almost as quickly as it had begun, but f*ck …
I knew before that in case of the Cold War turning hot, we were pretty much guaranteed to have Soviet tanks on our territory. One lieutenant told us that in case of war, when the local squadron took off in eastern direction, they expected less than half to come back.