There was a moment Friday when hope met dread, an instant when I began to accept that something catastrophic had sidestepped and hurdled the prayers of parents and educators.
A sleepy Lewis County morning was jolted awake by the jarring social media posts of Centralia High School students who had just been placed on lockdown with little information and plenty of cellphones.
“Someone call 911 … 813 Eshom Road,” one wrote on Twitter.
Those are the words of a teenager crying out in fear. They echoed through the newsroom’s social media feeds before any word of a lockdown, threat or act of violence had been announced by authorities.
For a moment, it felt devastatingly authentic.
This is what it would look like. This is how we would first hear the news.
In an era of technology and shared experiences, it would be our very children who would break the news of a school shooting. Not The Chronicle. Not KITI. Not CNN.
That’s not really shocking anymore. What is distressing is seeing that modern process play out before our eyes. Watching those words — posts on Twitter and Facebook — move across the computer screen attached to profile photographs of children was enough to rock me back in my chair.
I imagine if I were a parent of one of those students, I would have fallen to the floor.
Instead, they flocked to the school in droves, ignoring requests by district officials to stay out of the area and let police do their jobs.
Who on Earth could blame them?
“All I want is my parents,” one student wrote on Twitter.
Few mothers or fathers would deny that request from a frightened child who less than 24 hours earlier had likely seen the toll of a deranged man wielding weapons in Roseburg, Oregon.
Those images were painfully fresh in all our minds, no doubt lodged deeper in the psyches of those whose daily routine involves attending a school.
Wounded students being hauled to safety. Witness accounts of a man who mocked his victims before firing bullets through their brains. A backdrop meant for education soaked in blood and displayed on screens throughout the planet. All of it in high definition. All of it spread across the Internet in an instant. All of it terrifying.
Then, those same Centralia students toiling with the idea that something similar was about to erupt right there in their high school.
“This can’t be real,” a student tweeted.
We can all thank God that it wasn’t real. We can hug our children tight and breathe a deep sigh of relief knowing this was a devious hoax. Some can relax in the self-assurance that they assumed all along this was some sort of ill-thought sophomoric prank.
The fear though, the feelings elicited in that moment when real danger seemed possible and even likely, shouldn’t go anywhere. Nothing has changed.
We still live in a time when houses of education are prime targets for psychopaths and suicidal maniacs. We’ve raised a whole generation of children who have never known a time when mass shootings in the halls and classrooms of our nation’s schools were not commonplace.
There’s no moral to any of this, no one-size-fits-all solution.
We can talk about gun control. We can talk about better care for the mentally ill. We can talk about keeping guns out of the hands of those who would use them against our children.
The problem is, we already have. Unless something changes, there will be another calm morning shattered by news from children that they are under attack. There’s no reason to believe it can’t happen in Centralia. Or Chehalis. Or Napavine, Mossyrock, Adna and any other place we send our youths with the expectation that they will return home educated and better adjusted for the real world.
“Praying to God that he keeps us safe right now,” one student wrote on Twitter.
I’d never discourage anyone from crying out to their creator for safety, be it a student in duress or a parent in fear.
They deserve it. They deserve our best, not the world’s worst.
I pray to God that collectively we find a way to provide all of those things before another morning when hope meets dread, a time when a local student cries out in fear only to be silenced by violence that can’t be ignored, even here in sleepy Lewis County.
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Eric Schwartz is editor of The Chronicle
