Journal 9

Journal 9 - “Lockdown” Matt Steel


To be entirely honest I don’t pay attention to any issues in any media unless I’ve heard significant word of mouth. Many issues in any form of media are either overinflated, skewed, or dramatised for the desired result. Murders, rapes, 9/11, SARS, Swine flu, people love to hear about all that shit. People just absolutely love to finish a nine to five and return to a trashy living room, sit down, and think “Oh wow, isn’t it terrible that those six thousand people were raped and killed while their houses were torched to the ground. Sure glad it wasn’t me!”. I mean, what’s the point of living an empty, uneventful, 25 thousand a year life when you can’t turn on channel-who-cares and have an all american pity party? I don’t agree with the notion of our world being a different place simply because a couple kids snapped. We’ve always had guns and we’ve always had angry, confused teenagers to abuse them. In school I’d say I feel very safe. As safe as one could reasonably be in a public area. I’m not on bad terms with anyone that goes to this school, I’m not the kind of person to abuse some kid, and I’m not worried about anyone injuring me in a fight, let alone one starting. I guess I could catch a shell from some psychotic shooter but the chances of that happening are so slim that if it happened then hey, at least it’d be a good way to go.

I don’t have a legitimate way for our society to become more peaceful and if anyone in a grade 12 class claimed they did they’d be stoned. The first things that come to mind are the simple, fix everything solutions like “Teach our children to be more peaceful” or “increase violent crime penalties” or “reduce the availability of firearms” but honestly I’ve got few means to administer said solution to our society nor a way to prove any of them right. Hell, I think we should be able to carry firearms regardless, taking away a lumberjack’s saw only keeps the trees standing until he finds his axe.

This “lockdown” business is absolutely ludicrous and makes me fume at just the thought. Let me get this straight, there’s a violent threat of some sort so we are -

Locked in our rooms protected by 3cm of borosilicate, curtains, and a wooden door fastened to the wall with screws, window included.
Not aloud to leave
Not aloud to use our cellphones/internet
Must sit in pre-determined “safe zones”.

This is laughable. Being locked in a room with such flimsy security measures against a -violent- threat doesn’t even need it’s stupidity explained. Our RIGHTS to FREEDOM are withdrawn when we are threatened with repercussions such as expulsion. The reasoning behind the cellphone business has been justified because “The threats may have access to cellphone detection devices including GPS abuse”. Oh, the bloodthirsty murderer armed with technology allowing him to pick up a random cellphone GPS location and track it not to a general area such as the school, but to a specific location. The sociopath with government level technology will be stopped of course by two inches of wood hanging off it’s hinges with a couple steel screws. Jokes.