Lockdown

Yesterday, Holly texted me.

Not that novel an occurrence. We’ve probably texted each other every day since 2004.

“Olympus is in lockdown.”

More novel an occurrence, for Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, thankfully.

Sadly, not all that novel in America in 2023 where we have active shooter drills to go along with the fire and earthquake ones.

Holly didn’t have to explain what lockdown meant, why lockdown might happen, what the stakes of lockdown were. We all know.

The way things are going, most of us think about school shootings as more of a When than an If.

Our 15-year old son was in a classroom and was, per his most recent text, doing fine. But, like a real teenager, he wasn’t offering up a whole lot of detail. He was locked in a classroom, anyway, without much information.

I scoured the internet to find an update. I wasn’t the only one scouring.

A screenshot of Elon Musk’s app X.

Bradford Johnson’s tweet really got me. The part where the student reports “…and they told people from seminary to run and duck and get in a car.”

You see metal detectors at inner city high schools on tv. The narrative, depending on which channel you watch, wants to frame gun violence as a…Chicago thing? A minorities thing? A poverty thing? An uneducated Southern thing? A macho wild west Texas thing? A mental health thing? Not a thing at all?

Olympus High School—called such because it sits near the base of beautiful Mount Olympus on the east side of Salt Lake City—has some socioeconomic diversity, but a good chunk of its student body is white, upper class. And upper class on the very high end; some students coming from Walker Lane, where some of the richest people in Salt Lake live, where the average home goes for well over $1.5 million (and that’s nowhere near the high end). This is far from a school of hard knocks, much less a war-torn country. We’re not in the middle of a civil war (so far) or quelling insurgent uprisings (not lately, at least). But, still, we’re sending our kids off to Olympus High School in an unstable world of lockdowns and our advice?

Run and duck and get in a car.

Surely, this is not the best we can do.

---

I picked my 15-year old up from the gym later that day, when fortunately for us the lockdown had ended without incident (a luxury many parents haven’t been given). I was thinking we could debrief on the whole lockdown experience.

“So tell me about the lockdown…”
“It was nothing.”
“Were you scared?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“It was nothing. Just two kids who had beef the week before and were still beefing and someone thought one of them had brought a gun to school. And they searched and searched and nobody found any gun anywhere.”
“Oh. Well, that’s relief.”
“What’s for dinner?”

A lockdown shouldn’t be this ho-hum for a kid. I remember feeling vaguely stressed about getting our evacuation directions just right when we did fire drills in elementary school. Nothing was on fire. The voice on the PA was saying “this is just a drill” and still I was exceedingly worried about making sure my class went to the correct meeting place on the playground.

Not to make this about me.

But it is about me on some level. I mean, as parents, we’re supposed to just shrug this off? Look at that down there! It says Potential threat ON CAMPUS! What about that is even remotely shruggable?

It sounds dramatic and futile and faithless, but…where is safe?

We were lucky. There wasn’t even a shooting. Just worry.

The situation—guns and lockdowns and the NRA and the gun lobby and entrenched You Can Have My Guns When You Pry Them From My Cold Dead Fingers and radicalized angry old dudes in Utah who wanna play Civil War with the FBI—it all just feels so helpless. Little kids, over and over. People just grocery shopping. Folks trying to worship in peace. Concertgoers. Moviegoers.

And me—with another stupid fiery letter to a Senator who couldn’t care less—versus the millions of dollars from the NRA.