I read an article about school children practicing exiting their school. It wasn’t a fire drill, this was to prepare for a gunman roaming their hallways; the children were being trained to climb out windows and run. At first I thought, “How sad, that we have to prepare kids to live in such a world.” Many people commenting on the article felt the same.
But then I remembered my own childhood, and all I lived through.
When I was young, students practiced “Duck and Cover,” the act of getting under our desks in case of a nuclear war with Russia. My entire class was fingerprinted, because the Atlanta Child Murders were scaring the collective crap out of America. 38 million people watched the movie Adam, and America’s Most Wanted was born from the aftermath of the horrific event of child abduction that inspired said movie. Hospitals volunteered to x-ray Halloween candy, because the idea a razorblade could be inside an apple sent the country into such a tailspin that for a good many years trick-or-treating took place in daylight hours.
I realized that while times change, raising children to live with fear has always been the norm. Before my generation, it was the fear of race integration in the schools. Before that, polio. And so on back through time. Life has always been about fear, it’s just that adults tend to forget what we went through and want to protect the current generation from what they’re experiencing.
Read More… http://nathantimmel.com/2015/its-never-been-so-bad-as-it-always-is/