COMPLACENCY
Cindy Maddera
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Michael goes back to school on Thursday. He won’t have kids until next week. This week will just be meetings and getting organized. On Friday he’ll have mass shooter training. He told me this as we were eating lunch somewhere. I don’t know even remember where or if we were in Boston or Kansas City. He said all of this to me before the mass shootings committed by white terrorists over the weekend. I just remember feeling the food that I had just swallowed congeal into a lump and wedge itself in my throat. Michael is a high school math teacher. Not a policeman. Not a TSA employee. Not a first responder. Not a soldier.
He’s a teacher.
Every year, before the students show up to class, all of the teachers spend a day where someone comes into the building and pretends to kill them. And the teachers have to find a way to survive. Michael told me that last year, they were given a length of rope to tie up the door. He said that this seemed to work okay and then he shrugged nonchalantly. It was a gesture that I couldn’t quite understand. Was it a shrug of “whatever”? Or was it a shrug of apathetic acceptance of the situation? I feel like maybe when he tells me about the shooter drills that I’m supposed to think of it as normal. Like it’s just like a fire drill or a tornado drill. Active shooter drills are just our new way of life.
Except it isn’t.
The minute I see this as ‘normal’ is the minute I become complacent.
Michael and I have been watching the series Years and Years on HBO. The series follows a family through the years as the world sort of falls to pieces. Climate change causes heavy rains and rising seas that lead to flooding and the displacement of millions of people. There’s a story line on immigration and refugees seeking asylum. There is a story arc around banks collapsing and the financial crisis that follows. Through all of it, you watch this family as they go about their day to day lives. Things don’t really look all that different for them. There’s some job losses from the financial crisis. Love stories and relationships change. There’s health issues to be dealt with. Deaths to endure. All of it seems very much like everyone else’s normal daily lives. They just go on about their business. All while the world falls to complete shit around them.
Some times there’s a really fine line between fiction and nonfiction.
I just signed up at Everytown for Gun Safety to be contacted as a volunteer. I don’t want to just go about my daily life while the world falls to shit around me.