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The Utility of the School Desk

October 14, 2024


Happy Monday, friends! Have you seen the PSAs and news reels from the 1950s and 1960s that instructed American school children to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack? Perhaps you are of an age that you remember being those children. While I imagine that those videos were a mix of security theater and some safety advice in the event that a school was impacted indirectly by an attack of some sort, viewed today they appear both unrealistic and quaint in the same way one might compare an episode of Leave it to Beaver to actual life during the same era.


While a school desk in an American elementary school would not have protected any students against the brunt of a nuclear blast, today school desks have returned to a prominent protection role as they barricade doors and serve as cover against active shooters. Students of all ages are exposed to the persistent threat of their school or campus becoming a war zone every day. While the situation is already dire with the gun lobby and gun manufacturers hiding behind a mythical interpretation of the Second Amendment and an equally fictitious narrative and philosophy of the gun in American history, the problem has taken on an appalling twist: the commodification of school safety. Yes, the safety industry is not new, but investors and entrepreneurs have caught on to schools’ need for increased protection—particularly when political candidates call schools “soft targets” and school shootings a “fact of life”—and have created an array of safety products from doors which can be locked to the ground to prevent injury to collapsible safe rooms which teachers can quickly deploy to protect students. And while those products are definitely helpful and potentially lifesaving, the industry gains nothing from ending school shootings. Without a threat and examples of schools who didn’t deploy their products, these companies would lose their markets. Rather than address the issue with common sense gun reform, school safety has been sacrificed on the altar of late-stage capitalism where “solutions” require the problem to continue existing.


Rather than go to schools that are among the safest places for them, far too many students attend schools where their physical safety has been delegated to armed school resource officers, armed teachers with questionable levels of gun and gun safety training, folding saferooms, heavy inserts securing doors to the ground, and other contraptions dreamed up “to keep students safe.” Every student in the United States regardless of the kind of school they attend—private, religious, or public—or the level of education they are pursuing, is a potential target of gun violence. As long as guns are sold, legally possessed by almost anyone, and an industry exists which preys on students and their parents’ fears, no student will know the safety once felt by American school children hiding under desks during drills for nuclear attacks.


Did you feel safe in schools? What threatened your safety as a student?


Let us pray: God, bless our schools and communities with safety. Bring sides, factions, and cliques together to learn from each other and grow together. But more than anything quicken our hearts and enliven our advocacy to work for a world where students and adults don’t have to hide under desks from any sort of violence. Let our thoughts and prayers fall quiet, drowned out by our voices raised in protest for real change. School violence should never be “a fact of life.” Make it so and bless our action. Amen.


Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.


Faithfully,


Ben

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