We didn't have school shootings. We had bomb threats, and we liked it that way.
I'm not kidding, either. Several times a year, never on a rainy day that I can remember, some dumbass would call one in, and we school kids would spend the afternoon out on the playground while the fire department swept the building. It was a lot harder to trace calls on the land lines of that time, and I don't remember anyone ever being caught for it.
This was the early 1980s, during the period when this guy was not just ranting about technology; he was sending explosives through the mail.
Theodore John Kaczynski (/kəˈzɪnski/; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist.[2][3][4] A mathematics prodigy,[5] he abandoned an academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle, then between 1978 and 1995 he killed three people, and injured 23 others, in a nationwide bombing campaign targeting those involved with modern technology. In conjunction, he issued a social critique opposing industrialization and advancing a nature-centered form of anarchism.[6]
He was no joke, but we kids did not take these things seriously. We didn't have to; there were no technology gurus living in Brodhead, KY. And it was the 80s; we were terrible people, not at all like those world-saving kids on Stranger Things.
I was talking to my sister, who is a teacher in Kentucky, about their current situation. Although the Parkland shooting in Florida has overshadowed it, there was another one in the western part of our home state a couple of weeks earlier. Since then, a rash of phoned-in shooting threats, across at least 18 school systems, has kept up to 50% of the students home some days. Of course, these days phone traces are a snap, and according to my sister, there are several kids locked up right now on felony charges, but those after-the-fact consequences have not curbed the copycats so far.
This Lexington TV station built an interactive version of the infographic. Mouse over the counties to see the dates of the threats.
I fully expect to be called out for making light of this situation, but I don't care. We're so numb to the horror of these events that KY kids are now faking them as an excuse to play hooky. Here in NC, parents are using them in their political wranglings over school leadership.
