If you get picked up in the middle of a tornado, it will rip your head right off, the fourth-grader said with certainty. Don’t think so, I said, but it will almost certainly pick you up, swirl you around and throw you down hard somewhere else.
I refrained from describing the other drill that I and many students of the 1950s and 1960s practiced, the nuclear attack drills in which we were instructed to sit under our desks as a way to survive the blast. Some of my baby boom contemporaries liken the nuclear attack drills to today’s lockdown drills, doubting that today’s exercises in surviving a mad gunman stalking the halls will do no more harm to these young psyches than our time under the desks.
That ignores the fact that a kid’s knowledge of the consequences from nuclear attack in the middle of the last century was limited to about a third of the episodes of “The Twilight Zone” or drive-in movies in which irradiated giant ants impervious to bullets chased people through the desert.
Growing up on “The Wizard of Oz,” tornadoes were somewhat real to us. The teachers had no trouble maintaining quiet in the hallways during a tornado drill.
A nuclear attack drill, on the other hand, was an opportunity for mischief. Students with no inkling of the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction would kick balls of paper across the floors or toss paper airplanes down the aisles when the teacher was under her desk.
Now eligible for Social Security, those of a certain age can laugh at the foolishness or shake their heads at the uselessness of those old nuclear attack drills.
But based on the explanation of my two experts, lockdown drills are serious stuff. Possibly deadly serious. It’s unlikely today’s students will look back in the decades to come and laugh at them.
