Stay safe Harvard Community, Stay Safe Boston...

I saw my father pretty often on weekends and school vacations but it was very rare for him to show up anywhere in the comings and goings of my day to day life. With the possible exception of when I got in trouble for something really bad, that was kind of how I knew I was really in trouble, if it was something so bad that my mother got over her aversion for speaking to my father and actually called him, then I knew I was really in trouble. So it was a bit of a surprise to see him on the sidewalk outside Pierce School one afternoon in Brookline when the grammar school was vacated for what seemed to be a routine fire drill. The drill in and of itself was a little odd as were usually informed on days when there would be a drill and this one appeared to come as a surprise to the teachers as well as the pupils. I didn’t think too much about that at the time, I was just happy to be outside and out of class. The school could have burnt to the ground and I would have been thrilled at the time but that’s another story. I was pleasantly surprised to see my Dad and his presence was not completely out of place (he was dating a school employee at the time) but I was a bit perplexed as I had never seen him at the school before and a fire drill really didn’t seem to be an important enough reason to stop by. I had assumed he was just in the neighborhood and saw me out on the sidewalk but that was not the case. Standing on the sidewalk he very seriously and very quietly told me it wasn’t a real fire drill, someone had called in a bomb threat to the school. (later determined to be a hoax) I’m not sure how old I was at the time of that incident but I was most likely somewhere between the 6th and 8th grades, maybe somewhere between 11 and 13 years old. At the time it would have probably seemed improper to share such potentially frightening information with a young kid but these days kids even younger than I was at the time are quite familiar with active shooter drills in their schools. Bomb drills are probably just as common place as fire drills were back in my day. Whenever one of these scary incidents show up happening real time on my news feeds I can’t help but wonder, is this rash of threats really new or is it our age of lightning fast information sharing that makes it seem like there are more threatening incidents at educational facilities now more than ever before? Were the threats always there and we just didn’t know or talk about them (certainly not with children) or are we really actually living in more violent times? As we all wait minute by minute today to hear the latest about today’s reports of violence at Harvard University, I can’t help but wonder…