Writer Susan Konig had an interesting visit to her local daycare facility:
Last month, I put our toddler in daycare — my first foray into that situation in 12 years of motherhood. I’ve stayed home all these years and the three older kids are all in that aforementioned parochial school.
When I went to visit a local facility, the owner told me, without my asking, that they held three drills on a regular basis. Fire. Lockdown. And hide and seek.
The last one means that in 56 seconds, the entire staff and over 100 children can get behind changing tables and cabinets so that on the plasma screen in the lobby, it looks as though the place is deserted. They can hide your kids and this is a selling point. The kids think it’s a game. We parents know it’s a modern necessity.
This is not the first generation to do so. I'm sure Israeli schools have such drills. And remember that families who settled the west had such contingency plans for when the "natives" turned on them. Even the French have had to watch over their shoulders on occasion for the Germans. And the Romans had to watch for Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals. And Greeks and Turks have been eyeing each other for centuries. And Koreans and Chinese. And Russians and Mongols. And Hutus and Tutsies. I'm sure the list could go on for pages.
What is different in our situation is that we have lunatics in our midst who are not another ethnic group, a displaced minority, or a neighbour with a border dispute. These are the certifiably insane who have fallen through the cracks -- affected by drugs, alcohol, fatherlessness, MTV, child abuse, and other things, which are often glorified and promoted by our very own pop culture. We have scandalised our little ones -- by defending freedoms that don't exist -- and now are paying a price by shackling ourselves to a defensiveness that frightens our children even more.
Let's pray for sanity to return, and for family life to be restored. Only then will children be nurtured in ways that allow them to be confident, law-abiding members of our community, who build instead of destroy, who love instead of hate, who help instead of hurt. Otherwise, we're going down -- and we'll all be working on finding our hiding spots.
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