High Anxiety Lands in the Schoolyard

It was just another anxious night toward the end of the millennium.

Earlier that day, I’d had lunch with a friend. We talked about what was going to happen when the crack babies hit the schools.

“They’ll put them in special ed classes,” she said.

“Using what for money?” I asked.

As we paused, I overheard a woman at the next table saying, “. . . so we’re going to support all these old people, and then when we get old there won’t be enough young people to support us and Social Security will collapse.”

To my left, a man was saying, “In 20 years, the greenhouse effect will hit, the ocean will rise, and--poof!--there goes your high-priced California real estate.”

I fully expected the waiter to prance up, click his heels and announce the catastrophe du jour.

But last night was different. I wasn’t worrying about what was going to happen in five years or in 20 years or when I’m old and really gray. I was worrying about what I was going to do this morning. I was worrying about what to do about the bomb threat at my daughter’s elementary school.

Bomb threat. We needed that. Parents trying to raise children of an uncertain future. Teachers valiantly practicing their art on the front lines. A principal trying to run a school while governments withdraw money, parents retreat to private schools and everyone says: We’ve got enough to worry about--let the kids fend for themselves.

The unreassuring note came home from the school a few days ago. It explained that a crazy lady had appeared on the playground and begun distributing literature urging the “workers” to arise and revolt. The 10-year-olds teased her. She, according to the children, said she’d come back today “with the Ku Klux Klan, a bomb and an Uzi and shoot all of you.”

None of it made sense. Communist propaganda and threats of the Klan. Workers in a grade school. The lady was crazy. But what’s a sensible death threat?

The police, we were told, would protect the school. Furthermore, psychologists would be there to reassure the children. And fear not: There would be bilingual psychologists for the non-English-

speaking children.

There’s good news and there’s bad. Society may be spinning out of control, and we can’t stop it. But we can handle it in a politically correct manner.

For the past few days, I’ve been talking to other parents about what we would do. I’ve been going about my business, buying groceries, doing laundry, and always on the horizon of my mind is this nagging fact: bomb threat at my daughter’s school.

Yesterday, I went out for a hike and ran into a member of the City Council on the trail. She’s an elected official. A symbol of order. The person who was picked to do something .

“There was a bomb threat at my daughter’s school!” I blurted out at her as she attempted to find some solace among the ferns and lupine.

“Yes,” she said. “We had one at City Hall last week.”

There is no right way to handle this. That’s what all the parents said. Most said they’d send their kids to school today, that the authorities are doing their best, that this was not a “serious” bomb threat and that “even if you keep the kid home today, there’s tomorrow.”

Of course, there’s always been danger. I think back to my class in 1954, crouched in the cloak room, our heads between our legs, in “air raid position.” I remember our 30 little bodies breathing heavily in the dark as the roar of a jet arose in the distance. And we wondered: Would this be it?

No Russians to worry about today. Just one deranged American citizen.

My daughter is in the other room now. I kept her home from school. Maybe she’s as much a victim of my anxiety as the crazy woman’s ugly threat. But we’ll take it one day at a time, challenge by challenge, threat by threat.

At the back of my mind is the hope that it’s all numerology--fin de millennium behavior. We’ll go crazy for 10 more years, but once we see that big two followed by all those zeroes, everything will go back to normal. Then, my daughter and your daughter and all our children’s children will come skipping up the street to the eternally safe house.