Taking Responsibility for “The New Normal”

Like the late, lamented Sam Kinison used to say, just when you think society has hit rock bottom, it finds a way to sink even lower. Now little Amish schoolgirls are being bound, lined up against the blackboard and shot in the head execution-style. What a fucking evil, reprehensible world we are bequeathing our children.

America’s Elementary Schools are becoming fishbowls of eager, helpless victims-in-waiting for the psychologically unsound. I remember when school shootings were A) an anomaly, and B) usually perpetrated by the schoolkids’ alienated peers. How fucked up is it that those seem like the good old days?

This latest spate of school shootings scares the living Bejesus out of me. When I heard today’s news, I had to take The Man Cub in my arms and hang on for dear life for a few minutes. If it’s this bad today, how unspeakably unsafe will the educational paradigm be in a few years when he hits school age?

Something has to be done.

Now that it’s been made abundantly, repeatedly clear how very soft a target our schools are, how long do you think it will be before organized terrorists take over a school here in the USA, like they did in Russia a couple of years ago, and kill everybody in it? They’d be fools not to try.

I hate to say it, but it looks to me like our schools have got to become armed camps. The Last Boy Scout, also the father of young children, points out that it sucks that kids can’t be kids any more. He’s right. I remember playing outside after dark when I was a kid, as long as I stayed in the neighborhood. Those days are already long gone. I see a little kid out walking alone – in the daytime even – and I worry. I don’t see the little kid, carefully watching where he walks so as not to step on a crack and break his mother’s back, I see Predator Fodder.

And I’m not the only one. The predators see the same thing.

TLBS is right. It totally sucks. It’s frankly an outrage. But now that school shootings are starting to become as commonplace as carjackings in Compton (sorry, I’m a sucker for an easy alliteration), something will have to be done.

It’s part of the decline of American civilization, if you want it right between the eyes. All empires have their days – if you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know I believe that – and they almost always crumble from within, usually as a result of the lifestyle disparity between the haves and have-nots. (Enough have-nots get pissed and the next thing you know, Marie Antoinette is losing her head in the public square.)

Obviously, what these school shooters are lacking isn’t cash, and this phenomenon seems to cross all red state/blue state lines. But as a parent, I can’t just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the species devouring itself on cable TV like I did when I was single. These days, that’s George Carlin’s job.

So although it sucks that kids can’t be kids, we give up our rights piecemeal all the time. Before 9/11, we could wait with our loved ones in the airport terminal till the plane came. It sucks that we can’t now, but after a while, it becomes the new normal. And let’s not even mention the Patriot Act…

I would rather have the New Normal be an intrusively high-security public education experience than a 50/50 chance our kids won’t come home from school on any given day. Think of it as a doctrine of pre-emption, until only recently all the rage in DC.

Toward that end, I propose redeploying the National Guard to our public schools, protecting our absolutely most important DOMESTIC assets, rather than filling bodybags in Iraq or ‘patrolling’ the Mexican border to keep us safe from the threat of cheap labor. At least until we can come up with, fund and implement a more comprehensive technological solution, to make this nation’s schools the armed camps they are inevitably going to have to be; The New Normal around the corner.

If I was in Congress, I would come back from campaigning this fucking second and introduce a bill. From a strictly political standpoint, this issue could be a huge winner for whoever has the mixture of balls and simple common sense to make it happen.

It’s an ugly solution, but the alternative is even uglier. It’s time we faced reality and proactively take control of what the New Normal is gonna be, before the New Normal bends us over a school desk and takes control of us.