Civics lesson on the legacy of shame

I need to share an experience that took me by surprise.

Yesterday I was privileged to be invited to speak to two government classes at Warrenton High School. The topic of my presentation was voter registration for 17 and 18 year old seniors. I was there to help facilitate their ability to be registered and thus be eligible to vote in the upcoming May 15^th primaries and the mid-term elections in November.

I had just begun speaking for the 8:00 am class when suddenly the classroom speaker announced “lockdown.” The next moment, as I stood gaping, the blinds where down, the lights out, the doors automatically locked from the office, and rapidly and in absolute quiet, students were sitting against the wall adjacent to the hall, without a sound. 

In a barely audible whisper the teacher told me I would not have to sit against the wall. He then placed himself facing the wall of students and the two classroom doors. Again, there was not a sound. Seventeen students, unbelievably still, seemed frozen. I could not control my unexpected tears seeing that this is the new reality for these people the press and politicians keep mislabeling by calling them “kids.”

I remembered the “drop and roll” and the crawling under our desks while laughing, poking each other and suppressing giggles because being under a desk we were pretty sure would not save us from Russia’s Nuclear Bomb. It was a joke and if we were lucky we got out of finishing a pop quiz. Our drills were times of goofing off, laughing and a sense of avoiding classwork.

“Lockdown” was an exercise of a heightened realization that school shootings are now a possibility for these savvy school attendees. Their entire school lives have known, in some measure, school shootings. These eighteen year olds were not even alive when our signature school shooting, Columbine occurred. These young adults were born when we were wondering if planes would fall out the sky when the world calendars, computers and atomic clocks turned to a new millennium.

When the announcement that the lockdown drill was completed, the teacher shared he had attended Thurston High School and knew all about the killing of 2 students, wounding of 25 and the killing of the shooter’s parents. I asked him what year and he reminded me it was 1998. Again, before these students were born. That is given as reference point of how these events have now become a common part of America’s schools, no longer an unusual and horrific occurrence.

Shootings are now just another sad happening, flags at half staff and a week later pushed into an ever growing file of, “gosh, another school shooting!” news brief. But not to those eighteen year old students, silent, backs against the wall, in unison with students across the nation from kindergarten through high school and now the norm of the “lockdown”.

When students were re-seated I returned to passing out voter registration forms for completion. I had the opportunity to explain how Oregon has made registration a seamless process to assure every eligible Oregon citizen has an easy path to keeping our democracy strong with the vote. As I was finishing the presentation and began collecting registration forms a student pushed her form toward me and remarked, “this is why I’ll vote! I don’t worry about a fire or tsunami, I am afraid of some other person I go to school with will have one of those assault guns and shoot me and my friends. We are mad!”

I asked her if she would be in Astoria on March 24^th for the March for Our Lives.

“Of course!”

Our country, I believe, is in for a wake up by 18 to 25 year olds — not kids, but voting citizens with an agenda. Politicians….watch out, especially white good-old-boys attached to the NRA. I know I have been humbled by my assumptions and I’ve been clueless about the rawness of students’ rational fears. We have turned away, not protected, and minimized the power of our vote. They will shame us.