Everything's fine

Only no. It isn't.

Class was over for the morning, and I was back in my office, preparing for the next in a long line of indignities that come with semester’s end. Ask any professor. We are at the point where we are eating coffee grounds straight out of the bag. Sometimes, we use a spoon. Sometimes, we just tip the bag on end.

In the hallway, a student who’d just come from my class was walking back and forth, talking into her phone. Actually, she’d looked at her phone at the tail end of class, gasped, and left the room. I picked up a few phrases, “school” and “shooter” among them.

I teach at a small university. You know the students, especially in my small department. You know their hometowns, and sometimes even their pets’ names. I waited until the student appeared at my door.

Turns out her high school in New Jersey — which her brother still attends — was on lockdown after police got word that someone was driving to the school to, as a social media post said, “harm students.” That post included a gun.

The student called her brother, but, she said, he is 15 and of course his phone battery was low. She laughed as she said this, even as she acknowledged that she didn’t feel like laughing.

Police reassured the local news outlets that students weren’t necessarily in danger, but they went to the school — and at least one more in the district — just in case.

It’s a small town. My student said she knows the suspect, who’d been in her home and petted her dog. She knows — vaguely — the accused’s alleged accomplice.

Things are fine, she said. They’re fine.

But things are not fine. They’re far from fine. A 16-year old Black teenager is shot in Kansas City after he rings the wrong doorbell. A 20-year old woman is shot and killed after the car in which she was a passenger went up the wrong driveway in upstate New York. The hits — and the threats — just keep on coming.

Yesterday, the 16-year old’s high school emptied out to show their support for him. GoFundMe account abound.

To the people who want more guns to battle the guns we already have: Is this what you intended? Other countries have people with mental illness. Other countries have been able to limit gun violence. Why? Because they know, as do we:

Police arrested the New Jersey suspects some 100 miles away from the suspect’s stated target. So this was just another scare at an American school. Typical day, typical school with typical students who grew up with typical shooter drills.

Two brothers have been charged with murder after four people were shot and killed at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Ala. The grandson of the 84-year old who shot Ralph Yawl said that shooting never should have happened.

But really: Does any one feel safer?