What's Happened Here?

When did it all change?  Why did it all change?  How did it all change so much?  I grew up in the suburbs of San Mateo.  It was a middle class neighborhood in the hills above the town, on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, about 30 minutes south of San Francisco itself.  It was the fifties and sixties; a time when we boomers lived the American Dream defined by well-manicured lawns, ranch style homes and the notion that we, the children, would live in a better America. 

I went to Buena Vista Elementary School, roughly a mile from my home.  On most days I either walked to school or rode my bike.  The bikes were all parked unlocked in the racks in front of the school.  Parents or others who had business at the school walked onto the campus and went wherever they needed to go. 

In the time it took Lanza to drive a few miles, the Sandy Hook kids tucked their backpacks into cubbies along the wall and sat at their desks, ready to learn, ready to shift to the carpet for a story.

But then, shortly after 9:30 a.m., the world, and that shared innocence, shattered forever at Sandy Hook School.

Police said Lanza opened fire on two classrooms connected by a bathroom and a blueprint of evil. The shooting was limited to one section of the school. And then, the massacre was over -- terribly over -- almost as quickly as it began.

When the awful counting finally stopped at Sandy Hook School, 20 children and six school employees were dead. And people around the world mourned them like they were their own.

Because they were. (S.F. Chronicle, Dec. 14, 2012)

Some days I would walk home for lunch to enjoy a nice hot meal prepared by my nonna and then get back to school in plenty of time for the rest of the school day.  After school my friends and I would head home, sometimes dawdling to play in the expanse of fields behind the neighborhoods, playing army or cowboys or just romping and climbing trees.  On some afternoons we would arrive home an hour or more after school let out. 

The San Francisco Peninsula is earthquake country and so out of the necessity of compliance with some edict or another we would on occasion have earthquake drills; the alarm would sound and we would all get underneath our desks; we would curl into a tight tuck, hands clasped over our heads and giggle and whisper, quietly so as not to get in trouble.  The sixties were Cold War days so we had similar bomb drills.  And of course there were the fire drills when we all trooped outside, as calmly as could be expected from a bunch of third graders except of course for the occasional “goosing” of the kid in front of you. 

Milford High School teacher Amy Allegrezza is used to doing school safety drills, but this one was different.

For one thing, she heard the sounds of real gunshots coming from a police officer running down hallways firing blanks from a .38-caliber handgun.

And, instead of simply practicing the school's traditional, stay-in-place lockdown, Allegrezza and more than 500 other teachers, administrators, cafeteria and school custodians on Friday were told to consider new options, including breaking windows to escape, running zigzag through the school parking lot and, as a last resort, fighting back if the intruder makes it into their classroom. (Portland Press Herald, March 16, 2013)

When I was a kid our favorite game was to play army (and yes I know it isn’t PC to play that these days but our fathers had all fought in the “good war” and so it was acceptable).  Our toy guns could be pretty realistic looking and some of them “fired” caps which gave them a sound as well.  What wasn’t acceptable was for us to bring our toy guns to school.  The most threatening object in our school was the baseball bat that one of the PE teachers would tote around and occasionally tap on the concrete playground. 

As the post-Sandy Hook gun control debate continues, states such as Georgia, South Dakota, Colorado, and New York have emerged as bellwethers on how the nation is beginning to stand up to gun violence.

A day after the Georgia legislature ended bans on guns in bars, churches, and college classrooms, South Dakota passed the first law in the US aimed expressly at allowing school districts to arm teachers.

Guns are not outlawed in schools in 18 states and some school districts do have some armed teachers, but the vast majority of districts have not supported teacher-carry to this point. (Christian Science Monitor, March 9, 2013)

When I went to school we had a full curriculum; art, music, science, PE and numerous field trips.  California’s school system was the gold standard for the world.  With the advent of Proposition 13 in 1978, school funding plummeted.  Over the years funding for schools has continued to decline and now California is one of the lowest in per student spending in a nation that overall has seen the defunding of education.  Some effects of budget cuts include:

     Cancellation of summer school programs.

     Some public school classes in Los Angeles are so crowded that students perch on file cabinets, or sit on the floor, while teachers struggle to maintain quality and grade hundreds of papers.

     89 California school districts were unable to guarantee financial solvency last spring, while 18 filed "negative" solvency certifications with the state.

After the mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's CEO, called on Congress to put armed police officers in every school. 

"If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities," he said, "we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained -- armed -- good guy."

There are about 10,000 SROs (School Resource Officers) in the U.S. -- that's one for every ten public schools. It would cost the Westwood (Massachusetts) Police Department a lot of money to put an officer in every school. On average, Massachusetts police make about $60,000 a year. Westwood used to have two resource officers, but there were budget cuts.

Over the last three decades, there have been about 150 shootings in U.S. schools. But the argument for armed security defies cost-benefit analysis. This week, the board of finance in Newtown, Conn., added $400,000 to the town's budget, to put an armed police officer in every school. (Marketplace.org, March 14, 2013)

And so here we are.  I’m not quite sure where exactly “here” is.  I doubt that it’s the “better America” that my parents envisioned back in 1960.  They were both still alive when children no longer romped and played on the walk home from school because there no longer was a walk home from school.  Part of the daily drill included someone trustworthy picking up the children. But still, children weren't being shot dead in the "safety" of their schools.

Clearly not in their wildest nightmares would they have envisioned a Sandy Hook or a Columbine.  Neither did I.  And neither did you.  When I was in high school the most serious threats included getting “called out” to have a fist fight after school or getting your soda laced with a hallucinogen of some sort.  Neither is acceptable of course but they’re light years from a couple of trench coat clad classmates raking the school with bullets. 

I’m sad for this state of affairs and sadder still for my children and their children.  What is truly heartbreaking is that not only is there no turning back but our society seems bent to continue down this road of repugnance. 

And why are we continuing down this path?  Part of it is because of the gun lobby.  There is no compromise to be had from that quarter.  None.  The National Rifle Association is even going international; trying to block a UN sponsored international treaty to regulate the conventional arms trade.  Provisions of the treaty include a requirement that governments make compliance with human rights norms a condition for foreign arms sales.  It would also have states ban arms transfers when there is reason to believe weapons or ammunition might be diverted to problematic recipients or end up on illicit markets (you know terrorists and drug traffickers).  What is sinister about those provisions?  Perhaps the fact that blocking such sales would eat into the profits of US gun manufacturers (The US accounts for 40% of the world’s arms transfers). (Reuters, December 28, 2012) 

And part of it is us.  “I don’t want to read about it anymore,” and “I’m tired of all this gun talk,” are the laments I see on social media while the biggest worries seem to be that the favorite on Survivor got axed or entries to the New York Marathon were closed off.  Folks are going to start reading this post and as soon as they get to Sandy Hook simply stop reading; “I’m sick of hearing about it.  Can’t we move on?”

Sure we can.  In fact we have.  We've moved on to more and more and more gun deaths. As of this writing there have been at least 2728 gun deaths in America since Sandy Hook.  Those include; Sincere Tymere Smith, age 2, shot on Christmas Day; Cade Franklin Curry, age 12, shot three days later in Paris, Texas; Adam Bass, 10 months old – 10 stinking months old and he didn't get that taste of his first birthday cake.  But I forgot, you don’t want to read about this.  It’s too depressing and it’s too emotional.  It makes you cry or it just creates stress and starts arguments. (Slate.com keeps a running butcher's bill)

And we continue down the road in blissful ignorance of the intransigence of the likes of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who apparently thinks there should be NO limitations on what guns are available.  And so he spews the most ridiculous of arguments and one has to ask, "And this guy got elected to office?" We stand by like sheep while the debate is run by the black helicopter crowd that thinks we should be locked and loaded, vigilant for the next Hitler or Stalin that they think is lurking in every other dark closet.

The daily slaughter, an epidemic of paranoia, the power of a single lobby, the innocence slain and gutted, schools made armed camps and resources that could and should be used for education now used for security. This is where we are America. Do you like what you see?

When did it all change?  Why did it all change?  How did it all change so much?  I started with those questions and asked others and if you were expecting answers I’m sorry to disappoint.  I don’t have them. Maybe we can tackle these questions when we ask ourselves and demand the answer to the basic question; What kind of a society do we want to live in?