A New View: Innocence in Schools Lost

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction. A speculative foray into what the future may hold for us…some insights pleasantly teasing and some morbid, frightful and dark.

Can you imagine, for example, a future…a society… where somber children are ushered into their schools under the watchful eyes of armed guards in flak suits and scanned for weapons? 

The teacher enters the classroom, wearing a bullet-proof vest, and clanks menacingly her assault rifle on top of her desk, noticeable and readily available. She pats tentatively her holstered pistol. The wary, fearful children slide into their desks, under the vigilant and conflicted eye of the teacher trained to shoot and kill. Even kindergarteners are suspect as in this society weapons lie about accessible in their homes. Daily, deranged members of this futuristic, aberrant society threaten the lives of schoolchildren all through the polluted land. Schools, like prisons, are ‘locked down’ each day. The teacher picks up her weapon, pointing it, hands shaking, at her students and has the children empty their backpacks on their desks, since this culture allows the ability to create a new fashion in weapons made out of plastic, undetectable by metal scanners. 

Then, once again, the teachers initiate the daily drill, where room by room they usher their silent, disconcerted students into the bullet-proof ‘safe’ boxes where they huddle, unbelievingly numb, from an inferred fear. Then, imagine, as they were trained, the teachers hide behind their desks and aim their assault weapons at the locked door visualizing pulling the trigger which they know will spray multiple armor-piercing bullets per second at an imagined armed intruder.

Then the children, wide-eyed not from curiosity but anxiety, are ushered out of the bullet-proof box and   told to stand at their desk, raise their right arm at the flag, and recite not the National Anthem as the nation is no longer indivisible, and there is no longer liberty and justice for all, but, instead shout the altered line from the Star Spangled Banner: “And this be our motto: in guns we trust.”

Can you imagine, unfortunately without much difficulty, this sick, dark, and frightful future for our children? Could this happen? Is this happening?