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I’m not quite old enough to remember the era when students hid under their desks in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. I came of age in school during the sixties and seventies. We had lots of fire drills where we wandered aimlessly around the parking lot and teachers grabbed the opportunity to smoke and gossip. When I started working in 2000 in a huge public high school, I was introduced to active shooter drills. Essentially, your door automatically locks, students huddle in a silent group in a corner and you wait, wait to be told the shooter was in police custody. There was a special coded announcement made over the loudspeaker which guaranteed the information was true. Of course, if the shooter killed the office staff you might want to stay in your room. The reasons for these drills were sadly evident since Columbine in 1999—since then the United States has experienced 25 more mass school shootings with the loss of life close to 300.

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I hate war movies, anything about serial killers, doomed characters and endings that turn out the lights on all existing hope. My sister used to make me cry by reading the end of the novel Of Mice and Men with Steinbeck’s bleak vision of a doomed relationship between two men during the depression. She would say, “Look at the rabbits,” and I’d burst into tears. I’m not a fan of Steinbeck. If I know that a story either real or imagined ends in despair, I will probably avoid it. But I love King Lear and other tragedies as proof that human suffering is universal. Novels like Invisible Man, Anna Karenina, and the dark stories of Alice Munro move me with the truth, life can be terrible. Not, life is terrible. Go figure. I don’t find the battle inspired speeches in Henry V or the slaughter in Braveheart anything but awful. When slaughter is the answer there are no more questions.

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