So, Westfield High School in Indiana had itself a Monday.
You know the script by now. We all do. A phone call comes in. Some disembodied voice makes a threat. The gears of the lockdown machine grind into motion. It's so practiced, so routine, you could almost set your watch to it. The Westfield High School lockdown today was, by all accounts, a textbook execution of the worst drill imaginable.
Let’s be real. When the first alert goes out, nobody knows anything. The official message to parents is a masterclass in corporate crisis-speak. "All students are safe." "Please avoid the area." It's the same template they use everywhere, from Westfield, Indiana to Westfield, NJ or Houston. It's meant to be reassuring, but it's not. It's a sterile information vacuum.
"All students are safe" is a lie. No, not a literal one—I get it, nobody was physically harmed. But you can't tell me a teenager piled behind a barricade of desks and chairs, phone clutched in their hand, is "safe." Safe from what? The immediate threat, maybe. But safe from the corrosive, gut-level fear that this is just life now? Safe from the trauma of treating your chemistry classroom like a foxhole? Give me a break.
The police called it an "unverified threat." I love that term. It’s so clean, so procedural. It’s the kind of jargon that looks good in an after-action report. But what does it mean? It means some kid, or some psycho, decided to play God with the nervous systems of a few thousand people for an afternoon. And for the kids inside, there's no difference between "unverified" and "oh-God-it's-happening." The adrenaline doesn't check for verification. The terror is definately real.
You see the pictures. A photo sent to the local news shows the classroom door, blocked with whatever wasn't bolted down. It's a snapshot of pure, desperate ingenuity. The kind of thing you see in a disaster movie, except it's a high school in the Midwest. And we just… nod. We see it, we process it, and we move on. Because what else is there to do?
The police response was massive. They always are. Cops with long guns establishing a perimeter, sweeping the building room by room. It’s a necessary show of force, I guess. It's what you're supposed to do. This is a bad plan. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a fundamentally broken system where the only solution we have is to meet the idea of violence with an overwhelming display of tactical gear. We can't stop the threats, so we just get better at reacting to them. It's like perfecting your technique for plugging a thousand holes in a dam that's already cracked down the middle.
And outside, the parents gather. They're told to stay away, but they can't. Offcourse they can't. They just stand there, helpless, staring at the brick building that holds their entire world, waiting for a text or a news update. It's the most powerless feeling on earth, and we've normalized it.
It drives me crazy how the digital world just keeps churning on during this stuff. I bet if you checked the Westfield High School athletics page or the school calendar during the lockdown, it was business as usual. Announcements for the next Westfield High School football game right next to the red-banner alert. The dissonance is staggering. It's like one part of our brain is screaming in terror and the other is politely reminding us that team photos are on Thursday.
I read the reports. No shots fired. No injuries. Lockdown lifted at 3:30 p.m. Press conference at 4. The machine sputters to a halt, and everyone is supposed to feel relief. And I'm sure they do. But what about tomorrow? What happens when the news crews leave and the last cop car pulls away? The kids still have to go back into that building. They have to sit in those same classrooms and pretend they didn't just mentally map out the best hiding spots. They have to look at their teachers and remember seeing a kind of fear in their eyes that no adult should ever have to show a child.
They expect us to just accept this as a cost of living, and honestly...
Then again, maybe I'm the one who's broken. I'm sitting here, hundreds of miles away, tearing apart the language and the procedure because it makes me feel like I have some control. Maybe for the people there—the parents, the teachers, the cops—that cold, sterile procedure is the only thing that keeps the floor from falling out. Maybe the jargon is a shield.
But a shield against what? It doesn't stop the threats. It doesn't fix whatever is broken in our society that makes a Westfield High School threat a recurring news item. All it does is manage the chaos a little better each time. We’re not solving the problem; we're just getting more efficient at surviving it.
The New Fire Drill ###
And that's the real story here. It's not about the one "unverified threat" at Westfield High School. It's about the fact that we have a name for it. It's a thing that happens. We have a playbook. The kids know what to do, the teachers know what to do, the cops know what to do. Congratulations, America. We've perfected the art of cowering in place. We've turned raw terror into a tidy administrative procedure. And we'll do it all again next time. Because there will be a next time.
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