I haven’t been using this place much lately, but I just went off on Facebook about this and it’s bothering me enough that I want to put my feelings about it on record here on this place of mine.

Warning – Angry Frustrated Rant Coming –

So I made my son’s bunk-bed into a secret fort with our abundance of blankets, like he sometimes likes, to play and sleep in. And then he tells me that the darkest corner of his secret fort will be where he hides if there needs to be a lockdown.

And I was so stunned by how fucked up that is that I had no idea what to say. Later when I came downstairs I heard him moving around and told him he really needs to sleep and he told me he and his stuffed animals heard someone coming so they had to move to the lockdown place. So we talked about this a little.

But now I’m just so fucking angry at all of us, at our entire society. I’m so fucking angry that we have spent the 21st century surrendering to our fears and desperately trying to make our communities and countries supposedly “safer” instead of making them better and accepting a constant state of fear and paranoia and frankly a worse quality of life in exchange for trying to feel safer. I’m angry that I have to hear and read about parents who say things like “I shouldn’t have to explain homosexuality to my kids” but it’s OK to have “lockdown” be a normal part of a seven-year-old’s vocabulary.

And its not just school lockdowns. It’s airport security. It’s parents facing charges of neglect if they let their kids play a park unsupervised. It’s the fact that everyone I talk to seems to think we live in terribly violent and crime ridden times. Fear and paranoia are ruining us. And if you’ve ever laughed or mocked when you saw some archival footage of kids hiding under their desks in case of atomic bomb attacks remember that our kids today are practicing lockdown drills.