April 20. A day of bad news if ever there was one. Columbine, the day after the Oklahoma City and Waco. It's even Adolf Hitler's birthday.
It's such a scary day that one-third-to-half of Albuquerque high school students didn't go to school Friday. At some schools, up to 75 percent of them were absent. Teachers were even told not to plan tests for the day, since administrators didn't expect many students to show up.
Some of them just saw the day as the perfect opportunity to ditch - with so many other kids going AWOL, who would notice one more? But many were kept home intentionally by their parents to keep them safe in the event of a shooting, bombing or who knows what.
The worst that happened was a few water bombs at Santa Fe High School, for which the three students responsible will probably forfeit the next few years of their lives.
At La Cueva High School in northeast Albuquerque, students have been instructed to hide beneath their desks as training for a school lockdown. The desks offer better protection from bullets than they do gamma rays, but the image of frightened high schoolers ducking beneath their desks as alarms ring can't help but bring to mind the atomic scare of the 1950s.
Children cowering under desks did no more to prevent the threat of nuclear war than it will to prevent the threat of school shootings.
It may take a few years, but eventually some other gun-wielding student will blast his way into martyrdom on April 20, and after that no child will be allowed to step into a school on that day.
We might as well be honest with ourselves and make it a national holiday. We could call it "National Fear Day," the day when all Americans recognize their fear of terrorism by bolting their doors and huddling beneath the kitchen table with their children.
Unlike other national holidays, everything would close down on National Fear Day. No business would dare make itself the target of terrorists or disgruntled children by remaining open. The streets will be deserted except for the wild and depraved souls who relish the capitulation of the world's most powerful nation to a handful of gun-wielding maniacs.
The absenteeism on Friday was so startling that it was front-page news on Saturday and proof that terrorism works in America. Osama bin Laden must be reading this news with glee, realizing how easily the mighty United States can be brought to its knees for an entire day.
It's just another example of our tendency to adjust to the effects of a situation rather than deal with its causes. The trouble with National Fear Day is that it shows other potential perpetrators of terrorism that shooting up a school is an easy way to get attention, not just in the days after it happens but for years afterward. And taking all students out of school on that day won't save them from the next deliberately planned killing.
If a high school teen bent on killing knows that no one will be at school on April 20, he'll wait until the next day or another day when it is completely unexpected.
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American society cannot prevent tragedies such as Columbine by burying its head in the sand. Nor will it be helped by making a brutal example of every depressed teen who jokes about guns or bombs.
What are American children learning from all this? To hide fearfully whenever they hear a loud noise? To solve every problem by punishing anyone in a black trench coat?
The children of America are watching how their parents are reacting to Columbine and learning to avoid problems rather than seek out their causes and solve them.
This is not to imply that incidents such as Columbine have simple or easily solved causes. It isn't always clear what turns a normal moody teen into a murdering moody teen. It's an issue that needs to be seriously examined by our society.
Most importantly, the viewpoint of kids in high school must be considered. They know far more about the kinds of pressures and stress that lead to these kinds of incidents. Dismissing them as "too young to understand" is the most dangerous step in the direction of another mass murder.
Showing everyone that we're afraid is almost as bad. That's not to say we should do our best to gloss over Columbine and try to pretend it didn't happen, but we shouldn't let fear take the entire day from us. Next year, I hope every American parent sends their child to school on April 20, even if they insist on tripling security, too.
But more than that, I hope those parents take the time to realize that being afraid of high school killers is exactly what they want. Keeping children safe on National Fear Day by keeping them home only ensures they will be in even more danger the rest of the year.
