You wake up in the
morning and take your kid to school. The weather is nice. You’re in the middle
of planning your average day when suddenly you hear the sound of a new e-mail.
A message from your child’s middle school informs you that the school is in
lockdown because somebody saw an armed man on campus.
At first you don’t
really take it seriously. A kid probably mistaken something for a gun, it can’t
be real, right? There will be a refuting email any moment now. The time is slowly
ticking by, local news is starting to pick up the story. Somebody reports that there
was a shooting. You get another message from school, and another. It slowly
downs on you that it is happening for real. Your kid is inside the building
with some crazy gunman, and you are home without any means to help him or even
learn about what is going on. Messages from school stopped coming. Local news keeps
regurgitating the same info.
You can’t sit at
home any longer, you go to the parents meeting point, and on the way there you
see dozens of police cars, you see policemen with assault rifles, and then it
finally hits you with the full force: your kid is in danger! You are shaking,
you can’t cry because you are driving. Suddenly you can’t go to some meeting place
far away; you see a group of parents near the school. You stop. It helps to
talk with other parents, but this cold stone in the pit of your stomach
threatens to swallow whatever control you have left.
And then you see
the police starts moving, the cars are leaving, and police captain gives a
quick statement to the news stations: there is no danger, there was no gunman, and
the kid admitted that he didn’t really saw anybody, it was a hoax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYxlI5WUZE
What can I say; it
was probably the most terrifying experience of my life. I’ve seen policemen
with rifles before, on TV, but never in real life. I hope to never see them in
real life again.
