Cell phone rings; don't recognize the number. Hello? "This is a call from the Minneapolis public schools. You are receiving this call because this number is the designated emergency contact for a child in the public school system."
Parents will agree: The body's ability to dump an entire quart of adrenaline into the bloodstream at once is really quite amazing. The message went on:
"Your child's school -- yes, your child's -- is under attack by Chechen rebels led by Boris the Pig-Sticker, a gaunt, evil man with a Hitler mustache who will stop at nothing to raise international awareness for his cause."
That's not what the voice said, but that's what you hear. The call is over, and all you remember is "school," "threat" and "lockdown." It takes a few seconds before you realize it's all schools, and now your knees start knocking a bit slower, so they're somewhere between Chihuahua-on-meth and a hummingbird grasping a power line. You dimly recall something about there being no need to get your kid, which gives birth to one potent thought: I MUST GO GET MY KID. But no. Then the terrorists will have won.
Since I work in the throbbing heart of the newsroom, I was able to learn certain things: It was a yellow alert, for example. Meaning ... what? ORANGE ALERT STATUS at the airport means we can take ticking packages from nervous men with burning eyes but we had better ask them if it's a bomb first. It meant something to the bureaucracy but nothing to parents, and I suspected that thousands were marinating in an OMG sweat as well.
Seeking answers, I went to my child's school. Two doors were locked. One was open. So "yellow alert" means watch for someone who gives up easily? No: The third door was for parents who wanted to get their kids out, because if it was locked, some parents would chew through the brick wall to get to their kids. Someone was watching to make sure I was not a miscreant.
Inside, the school was loud and happy: picture day, which meant a holiday from learning. The fear level: nil.
Asked the folks in the office how it had been going: When the news hit the media, I was told, the switchboard blew up, because initial radio reports didn't say "don't pick up your kid," some parents strapped on the Kevlar and ran to school with a Bowie knife between their teeth. One parent had came by for tot-extraction at this school, and other schools had reported the same. The office mood was composed -- concerned, careful, reasonable. As the principal explained, they drill often for red alert situations, where doors are locked and kids retreat to a safe dark corner of the room. Far from being the stuff of duck-and-cover nightmares, he said the kids ask for more red alert drills, since it's a break from the hideous torture of improper fractions.
