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Kindergarten students lie on the floor during a classroom lockdown drill February 18, 2003 in Oahu, Hawaii. Lockdown procedure is used to protect school children from possible threats on campus such as intruders, terrorism or military attack.
"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" It's a question I ask him every day.
"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill today." And that's about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious three-year-old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began, she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.
"Why? Why? Why?"
"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"It's as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains easily startled long after they're over, running for shelter between an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I just couldn't square my son's loving exuberance and confidence in the people around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all, do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that's been on my mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine, so proud to share his classroom with them.
"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldn't have to practice surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.
Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice for this kind of thing."
Thinking the Unthinkable
I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents' generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon -- this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of them.
Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus's generation? And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century whys?
Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are), that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does need to endure more lockdown drills.
The consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14, 2012.
"It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons."
But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me? When it makes no sense, period?
Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. "Because it teaches racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity."
So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room wall. I couldn't tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.
I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to pass on to the next generation. I guess I'm happy that they don't know what nuclear weapons are (yet) and it's one more thing I'm not looking forward to explaining to them.
The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as best we -- I -- can. It's a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of ours, and it's a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But if we don't, others surely will. In these early years, our kids turn to us first, but if we can't or won't answer their questions, how long will they keep asking them?
Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?
"Why Do the Police Kill People?"
At some preschools, it's protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I can't tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It's as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.
Still, it's strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantanamo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three-year-old and how the very things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I'm sure we'll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn't think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, "Because it's nuts! And we're nuts!" I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, there's the anxiety I have about how he'll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For five and six-year-olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn't get enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing's going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don't exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we don't live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?
Of course, there's another problem lurking here and it's mine. I'm not there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I'm not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn't be creepier. They're a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever because they get sick and their bodies get old, and their organs don't work anymore, and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.
And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well, largely unanswered.
Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why? Why?
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"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" It's a question I ask him every day.
"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill today." And that's about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious three-year-old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began, she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.
"Why? Why? Why?"
"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"It's as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains easily startled long after they're over, running for shelter between an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I just couldn't square my son's loving exuberance and confidence in the people around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all, do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that's been on my mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine, so proud to share his classroom with them.
"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldn't have to practice surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.
Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice for this kind of thing."
Thinking the Unthinkable
I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents' generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon -- this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of them.
Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus's generation? And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century whys?
Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are), that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does need to endure more lockdown drills.
The consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14, 2012.
"It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons."
But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me? When it makes no sense, period?
Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. "Because it teaches racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity."
So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room wall. I couldn't tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.
I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to pass on to the next generation. I guess I'm happy that they don't know what nuclear weapons are (yet) and it's one more thing I'm not looking forward to explaining to them.
The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as best we -- I -- can. It's a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of ours, and it's a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But if we don't, others surely will. In these early years, our kids turn to us first, but if we can't or won't answer their questions, how long will they keep asking them?
Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?
"Why Do the Police Kill People?"
At some preschools, it's protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I can't tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It's as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.
Still, it's strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantanamo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three-year-old and how the very things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I'm sure we'll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn't think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, "Because it's nuts! And we're nuts!" I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, there's the anxiety I have about how he'll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For five and six-year-olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn't get enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing's going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don't exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we don't live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?
Of course, there's another problem lurking here and it's mine. I'm not there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I'm not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn't be creepier. They're a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever because they get sick and their bodies get old, and their organs don't work anymore, and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.
And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well, largely unanswered.
Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why? Why?
"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" It's a question I ask him every day.
"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill today." And that's about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling. Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy) pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious three-year-old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began, she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet. Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.
"Why? Why? Why?"
"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"It's as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus remains easily startled long after they're over, running for shelter between an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I just couldn't square my son's loving exuberance and confidence in the people around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all, do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject that's been on my mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine, so proud to share his classroom with them.
"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldn't have to practice surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.
Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice for this kind of thing."
Thinking the Unthinkable
I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents' generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon -- this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to be safe was to get rid of them.
Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared, while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamus's generation? And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century whys?
Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are), that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does need to endure more lockdown drills.
The consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14, 2012.
"It makes me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons."
But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to me? When it makes no sense, period?
Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question. My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly, largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. "Because it teaches racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants, because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity."
So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room wall. I couldn't tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.
I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to pass on to the next generation. I guess I'm happy that they don't know what nuclear weapons are (yet) and it's one more thing I'm not looking forward to explaining to them.
The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as best we -- I -- can. It's a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of this world of ours, and it's a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain the hard stuff? But if we don't, others surely will. In these early years, our kids turn to us first, but if we can't or won't answer their questions, how long will they keep asking them?
Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles alike, still here?
"Why Do the Police Kill People?"
At some preschools, it's protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I can't tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It's as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.
Still, it's strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantanamo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three-year-old and how the very things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I'm sure we'll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn't think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, "Because it's nuts! And we're nuts!" I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, there's the anxiety I have about how he'll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For five and six-year-olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn't get enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing's going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don't exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we don't live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?
Of course, there's another problem lurking here and it's mine. I'm not there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I'm not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn't be creepier. They're a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever because they get sick and their bodies get old, and their organs don't work anymore, and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.
And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as well, largely unanswered.
Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why? Why?
The senator said the negotiations could be "a positive step forward" after three and a half years of war.
Echoing the concerns of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders about an upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said the interests of Ukrainians must be represented in any talks regarding an end to the fighting between the two countries—but expressed hope that the negotiations planned for August 15 will be "a positive step forward."
On CNN's "State of the Union," Sanders (I-Vt.) told anchor Dana Bash that Ukraine "has got to be part of the discussion" regarding a potential cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, which Putin said last week he would agree to in exchange for major land concessions in Eastern Ukraine.
Putin reportedly proposed a deal in which Ukraine would withdraw its armed forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, giving Russia full control of the two areas along with Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
On Friday, Trump said a peace deal could include "some swapping of territories"—but did not mention potential security guarantees for Ukraine, or what territories the country might gain control of—and announced that talks had been scheduled between the White House and Putin in Alaska this coming Friday.
As Trump announced the meeting, a deadline he had set earlier for Putin to agree to a cease-fire or face "secondary sanctions" targeting countries that buy oil from Russia passed.
Zelenskyy on Saturday rejected the suggestion that Ukraine would accept any deal brokered by the U.S. and Russia without the input of his government—especially one that includes land concessions. In a video statement on the social media platform X, Zelenskyy said that "Ukraine is ready for real decisions that can bring peace."
"Any decisions that are against us, any decisions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace," he said. "Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier."
Sanders on Sunday agreed that "it can't be Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump" deciding the terms of a peace deal to end the war that the United Nations says has killed more than 13,000 Ukrainian civilians since Russia began its invasion in February 2022.
"If in fact an agreement can be negotiated which does not compromise what the Ukrainians feel they need, I think that's a positive step forward. We all want to see an end to the bloodshed," said Sanders. "The people of Ukraine obviously have got to have a significant say. It is their country, so if the people of Ukraine feel it is a positive agreement, that's good. If not, that's another story."
A senior White House official told NewsNation that the president is "open to a trilateral summit with both leaders."
"Right now, the White House is planning the bilateral meeting requested by President Putin," they said.
On Saturday, Vice President JD Vance took part in talks with European Union and Ukrainian officials in the United Kingdom, where Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President in Ukraine, said the country's positions were made "clear: a reliable, lasting peace is only possible with Ukraine at the negotiating table, with full respect for our sovereignty and without recognizing the occupation."
European leaders pushed for the inclusion of Zelenskyy in talks in a statement Saturday, saying Ukraine's vital interests "include the need for robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity."
"Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a cease-fire or reduction of hostilities," said the leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Cancellor Friedrich Merz, and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. "The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force."
At the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, British journalist and analyst Anatol Lieven wrote Saturday that the talks scheduled for next week are "an essential first step" toward ending the bloodshed in Ukraine, even though they include proposed land concessions that would be "painful" for Kyiv.
If Ukraine were to ultimately agree to ceding land to Russia, said Lieven, "Russia will need drastically to scale back its demands for Ukrainian 'denazification' and 'demilitarization,' which in their extreme form would mean Ukrainian regime change and disarmament—which no government in Kyiv could or should accept."
A recent Gallup poll showed 69% of Ukrainians now favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible. In 2022, more than 70% believed the country should continue fighting until it achieved victory.
Suleiman Al-Obeid was killed by the Israel Defense Forces while seeking humanitarian aid.
Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian soccer star who plays for Liverpool's Premiere League club and serves as captain of Egypt's national team, had three questions for the Union of European Football Associations on Saturday after the governing body acknowledged the death of another venerated former player.
"Can you tell us how he died, where, and why?" asked Salah in response to the UEFA's vague tribute to Suleiman Al-Obeid, who was nicknamed the "Palestinian Pelé" during his career with the Palestinian National Team.
The soccer organization had written a simple 21-word "farewell" message to Al-Obeid, calling him "a talent who gave hope to countless children, even in the darkest of times."
The UEFA made no mention of reports from the Palestine Football Association that Al-Obeid last week became one of the nearly 1,400 Palestinians who have been killed while seeking aid since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israel- and U.S.-backed, privatized organization, began operating aid hubs in Gaza.
As with the Israel Defense Forces' killings of aid workers and bombings of so-called "safe zones" since Israel began bombarding Gaza in October 2023, the IDF has claimed its killings of Palestinians seeking desperately-needed food have been inadvertent—but Israeli soldiers themselves have described being ordered to shoot at civilians who approach the aid sites.
Salah has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinians since Israel began its attacks, which have killed more than 61,000 people, and imposed a near-total blockade that has caused an "unfolding" famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. At least 217 Palestinians have now starved to death, including at least 100 children.
The Peace and Justice Project, founded by British Parliament member Jeremy Corbyn, applauded Salah's criticism of UEFA.
The Palestine Football Association released a statement saying, "Former national team player and star of the Khadamat al-Shati team, Suleiman Al-Obeid, was martyred after the occupation forces targeted those waiting for humanitarian aid in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday."
Al-Obeid represented the Palestinian team 24 times internationally and scored a famous goal against Yemen's National Team in the East Asian Federation's 2010 cup.
He is survived by his wife and five children, Al Jazeera reported.
Bassil Mikdadi, the founder of Football Palestine, told the outlet that he was surprised the UEFA acknowledged Al-Obeid's killing at all, considering the silence of international soccer federations regarding Israel's assault on Gaza, which is the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and has been called a genocide by numerous Holocaust scholars and human rights groups.
As Jules Boykoff wrote in a column at Common Dreams in June, the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) has mostly "looked the other way when it comes to Israel's attacks on Palestinians," and although the group joined the UEFA in expressing solidarity with Ukrainian players and civilians when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, "no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians."
Mikdadi noted that Al-Obeid "is not the first Palestinian footballer to perish in this genocide—there's been over 400—but he's by far the most prominent as of now."
Al-Obeid was killed days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved a plan to take over Gaza City—believed to be the first step in the eventual occupation of all of Gaza.
The United Nations Security Council was holding an emergency meeting Sunday to discuss Israel's move, with U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia, and the Americas Miroslav Jenca warning the council that a full takeover would risk "igniting another horrific chapter in this conflict."
"We are already witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable scale in Gaza," said Jenca. "If these plans are implemented, they will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings, and destruction, compounding the unbearable suffering of the population."
"Whoever said West Virginia was a conservative state?" Sanders asked the crowd in Wheeling. "Somebody got it wrong."
On the latest leg of his Fighting Oligarchy Tour, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders headed to West Virginia for rallies on Friday and Saturday where he continued to speak out against the billionaire class's control over the political system and the Republican Party's cuts to healthcare, food assistance, and other social programs for millions of Americans—and prove that his message resonates with working people even in solidly red districts.
"Whoever said West Virginia was a conservative state?" Sanders (I-Vt.) asked a roaring, standing-room-only crowd at the Capitol Theater in Wheeling. "Somebody got it wrong."
As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, some in the crowd sported red bandanas around their necks—a nod to the state's long history of labor organizing and the thousands of coal mine workers who formed a multiracial coalition in 1921 and marched wearing bandanas for the right to join a union with fair pay and safety protections.
Sanders spoke to the crowd about how President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was supported by all five Republican lawmakers who represent the districts Sanders is visiting this weekend, could impact their families and neighbors.
"Fifteen million Americans, including 50,000 right here in West Virginia, are going to lose their healthcare," Sanders said of the Medicaid cuts that are projected to amount to more than $1 trillion over the next decade. "Cuts to nutrition—literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids."
Seven hospitals are expected to shut down in the state as a result of the law's Medicaid cuts, and 84,000 West Virginians will lose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, according to estimates.
Sanders continued his West Virginia tour with a stop in the small town of Lenore on Saturday afternoon and was scheduled to address a crowd in Charleston Saturday evening before heading to North Carolina for more rallies on Sunday.
The event in Lenore was a town hall, where the senator heard from residents of the area—which Trump won with 74% of the vote in 2024. Anna Bahr, Sanders' communications director, said more than 400 people came to hear the senator speak—equivalent to about a third of Lenore's population.
Sanders invited one young attendee on stage after she asked how Trump's domestic policy law's cuts to education are likely to affect poverty rates in West Virginia, which are some of the highest in the nation.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes a federal voucher program which education advocates warn will further drain funding from public schools, and the loss of Medicaid funding for states could lead to staff cuts in K-12 schools. The law also impacts higher education, imposing new limits for federal student loans.
"Sometimes I am attacked by my opponents for being far-left, fringe, out of touch with where America is," said Sanders. "Actually, much of what I talk about is exactly where America is... You are living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and if we had good policy and the courage to take on the billionaire class, there is no reason that every kid in this country could not get an excellent higher education, regardless of his or her income. That is not a radical idea."
Sanders' events scheduled for Sunday in North Carolina include a rally at 2:00 pm ET at the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in Greensboro and one at 6:00 pm ET at the Harrah Cherokee Center in Asheville.