LETTER: Think Of The Children!

”Think of the children” is a cliché that evolved into a rhetorical tactic. The phrase has become the nickname for a type of logical fallacy. It is popular among those who would appeal to emotion to promote an outcome that might be perceived as undesirable if we weren’t so focused on saving the children.

The bald-faced appeal in last week’s Progress Editorial (“Don’t Send Us Back To The End Of The Line: PROGRESS Jan. 23, 2019) “ to “think of the children” almost seemed like a parody. Our school children were portrayed in a placid scene of tranquillity, socializing with their peers. Then the dark spectre of disaster appears in the background. We are invited to imagine the worst. We must act to save the children!

And so we cry, “Why are we treated differently from Las Vegas schools!? We want to be like them!” The irony is instructive. Does anyone believe that Las Vegas schools are safer than our schools?

It is true that a shotgun could breach our schools’ defenses and put an assailant in classrooms in seconds. Changing that would require more than a fence. Secure Las Vegas schools are built differently than our schools. To provide that kind of security we would have to demolish the schools and rebuild. Or we could build substantial perimeter walls. But even these extreme measures would not protect against drone attacks. A weaponized drone does not cost much more than a shotgun and represents substantially less risk to the attacker. If you want to imagine the worst, you better think about drones. And dirt cheap IEDs. If you don’t plan for that, you haven’t thought very far ahead. You will spend a lot of money for very little improvement. And you still haven’t addressed the hundreds of students trapped in buses outside the Green Zone.

Personally, I don’t want my child in a Las Vegas school. I don’t want to be like Las Vegas. I don’t think it is safer. It seems self-evident that safety does not come from building Green Zones.

My biggest concern is that this is not self-evident. Some seem to think that safety comes from security forces. We are teaching our children to accept a world where it is normal to require metal detectors at schools, personnel in full tactical gear at school events, and other harbingers of distopia. We are slowly boiling the frog, and our children and grandchildren are the frog.

Please don’t pass this nonsense to the next generation. Please keep one small corner of the world where there isn’t bullet-proof glass between teachers and students. Please have the courage to live openly. Don’t imagine the worst and then build a world to reflect it. Think of the children.

I vote that we bring back Chemistry class before we build a blast wall. But come to think of it, maybe I do have that backwards.

Sean McMurray