Bombs in Schools are Cool Again!
Chris Zasada December 27, 2003

Recently, the college that I attend had a bomb scare. It turns out the only cause for alarm was that someone left an unknown package lying around, and it was safe to assume that it was left there by an Al Qaeda terrorist seeking to bring America to its knees by blowing up a community college in northwest Ohio (Northwest Ohio’s #1 choice, no less). The package, strangely enough, was not an explosive, but a common, everyday, non-exploding box. The incident left me with a nostalgic sigh, remembering the good old days of high school which could best be described in one word: paranoid.

Back in the late nineties, the air waves were ablaze with news reports of the Columbine school shootings. No one could turn around without hearing reports about not only the situation, but what caused it and, most importantly, what could be done to prevent it from happening somewhere else. The hitch was, everyone was latching onto false positives of the cause and solution. The cause was violent movies, music, and video games. The solution was to instate a mass panic and nail all American teenagers to wooden posts.

Unfortunately, nailing teenagers to posts wasn’t a practical solution, even though most of them were pierced already. So instead, schools around the country began instituting security measures to prevent students from killing each other, at least with weapons.

When I say “schools around the country”, I mean schools that never actually had the threat of violence happening ever. The most some of these schools saw in the way of hostility was heated arguments over whose parents make more money, followed by insults over the other person’s car. The schools that actually had problems with crime didn’t do anything; they figured if someone came in and tried to kill everyone, at least the other students would already be armed and could take care of themselves.

My high school, Clay High, however, was definitely not one of the armed ones. It was a sizable, suburban country high school where the worst thing that ever happened was that idiots were the upper class of the school social structure. While the thought crossed my mind to say that the worst thing to happen at Clay was the occasional fist fight, the flaw in my logic was that the fist fights almost always involved idiots, and could ideally lead to both of them beating the life out of each other. The worst thing that could possibly happen in that situation was someone breaking up the fight.

So Clay was a pretty safe place, as is Oregon, the town it's located in. I’m obviously ignorant to the circumstances of the Columbine incident, but I’m pretty sure that the chemistry was different there than at Clay. I base this on one fact: everyone in Oregon is the same.

This is a gross exaggeration, but not entirely false. Oregon and its schools have a vast array of different people with different personalities, interests, goals, and philosophies, but if one had to boil them all down to the purest substance, we were all, in essence, white, middle-class suburbanites who lived in a small city. Most diverse types filtered into the school and formed their own groups that they pretty much stayed in. The student body really wasn’t much of a threat, save for, in all seriousness, the occasional fist fight.

Then the school shootings started, and before long, paranoia ensued. The first significant incident in relation to the threat of violence happened during my sophomore year: Bomb Day. It is a day that I will always lovingly remember.

It started when a moronic student thought that he would be clever and call in a bomb threat against the school (on a Tuesday, if memory serves me). I think most of us knew that it was just some prank started by the stupidest and most tactless rube the school could muster, but administration opted for a “better safe than sorry” policy and made the rumored target day an optional day for students. I looked at the notice about the optional day and thought that it was one of the dumbest things ever, and, being a person of moral obligation, resolved that I wouldn’t miss a day of school for something this stupid. I got on the school bus on Bomb Day, optimistic that my schoolmates would have enough common sense and decency to come in, despite the threat that was clearly a sham, and know that we were all perfectly safe.

Being optimistic about the integrity of my fellow classmates was a big mistake. I thought that maybe ten percent of the student body would be absent, tops. When I got to school, I soon realized that likely less than ten percent of the student body actually showed up. My opinion of the people at Clay lowered a notch. Granted, some people might have been genuinely scared, but this possibility was so remote, I barely considered it. They just wanted a day off.

The day was not a bust, however. The teachers were disgusted with those who didn’t show up, and praised those who did by offering extra test reviews. While it doesn’t sound like much, I actually enjoyed it. Not so much the reviews as the fact that something different was happening that day, something out of the ordinary. I found that I enjoyed the lack of people during school, as if I was one of the elite who were honorable and brave enough to charge into the unknown without fear. Really, though, not having idiots around was a blast, and watching a bit of Akira during French class was a refreshing experience.

The next few years were not as kind to the students. The school almost immediately instated a “no backpacks” policy for classrooms, a policy largely ignored, but one that made the few insightful people think. This was to be the first of several anti-violence policies.

Some policies were serious, and others were not so well thought out. The school did away with individual locks for lockers, opting instead for standardized locks that could easily be opened by authorities. Closer watch was given by faculty, who enforced a stricter hall pass system. Security guards were now the norm.

Administration also cooked up some far more inane procedures. For a while, no shirts baring logos (such as for bands, television shows, ect) were permitted at school. I’m still not sure how this was supposed to help lower the chance of an attack on the school. It would seem like restricting the dress code further would RAISE the chances of someone snapping and taking some students with him.

Maybe that’s why administration decided to cut down the bushes on campus in order to make sure no one would hide behind them. I’m not sure why a raging psycho would chose to hide in some ground-level bushes to pick people off with his gun when no one would be stupid enough to try and get in his way, but that’s why these administrative types get paid the big bucks and I get stuck looking at some bare brick walls that were previously covered by foliage.

After I graduated, I heard that the school had security cameras installed. I actually saw these, and once again, I thought it was the most wasteful and paranoid idea administration thought up yet. I predict that metal detectors and random bomb searches are not too far off. Students will eventually be forced to wear shock collars, which will deliver an incapacitating electric shock when a student’s blood pressure gets to high, indicating thoughts of terrorist activity, or possibly test anxiety, but you can never be too careful.

This was the type of endless fun brought about by two psychos who couldn’t take the teasing any longer. The worst part is, I feel their pain. I can understand wanting to lash out at the idiots who tortured them while the teachers and administration sat back, powerless because condemning the idiots for such minor acts wouldn’t be “fair." Idiots need punishment, which is what I’ve been saying forever.

But then these winners come up and shoot everyone. Guys, I know you were angry and thought that it was justice to shoot at everyone and teach them a lesson, but all you did was make yourselves look like crazies, the likes of which should be wiped from the Earth, according the American public. You not only left a trail of fear, you also killed a lot of innocent people. Good one, you jerks. Rest in pieces.

Of course, I’m not trying to make light of the school shootings of the late nineties. It was a tragedy, there is no denying it, and the fear and mistrust and blaming these incidences left in their wake is nothing compared to the lives lost because of kids who just couldn’t deal with it anymore.

The purpose of this article was to reflect the after effects of these tragedies and how they shaped a part of the lives of students, more specifically me, who really weren’t involved in them. This isn’t a soapbox speech about mean bullies, insensitive school systems, getting rid of idiots (for a change), or the possibilities available to change them. This is a simple reflection on how a situation, or rather, the response to a situation, has affected one person’s future responses to similar events.

Put simply, the bomb scare at the college brought back fond memories of high school where the person next to you could be a student terrorist ready to kill you. This is an exaggeration, like I said, because I firmly believe that this would never happen in Oregon, even though the media and administration was trying to convince us otherwise. Fun times.