{"id":18129,"date":"2014-02-24T08:30:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T12:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18129"},"modified":"2014-02-24T12:15:43","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T16:15:43","slug":"the-new-normal-school-shootings-as-industrial-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/02\/24\/the-new-normal-school-shootings-as-industrial-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Normal: School Shootings as Industrial Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An entire train full of crude oil slides and tumbles 11 miles down hill. Image from NBCNews<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One morning, in the seventh grade, my math class was told to prepare for a surprise standardized writing test. A writing test with no warning in math class wasn\u2019t the weirdest thing we had been asked to do. Jeb Bush was our governor and Florida was a proving ground for what would later be called \u201cNo Child Left Behind.\u201d Tests were common and testing different kinds of tests were even more common. You never knew if the test you were taking would change your life or never be seen again. This one was a little bit of both. The prompt was really strange, although I don\u2019t remember what it was. As a life-long test taker (my first standardized test was in the 4th<\/sup> grade) you become a sort of connoisseur of writing prompts. This one didn\u2019t seem to test my expository or creative writing skills. It just felt like a demand to write and so we did. We wrote for about half an hour.<\/p>\n

Almost as soon as our teacher told us to put our pencils down an assistant principle came into the room with a stack of tests from other classrooms. She looked hurried and the security guard behind her with the metal detector wand looked impatient. As she collected the tests from our teacher the assistant principle told us to stand up and wait to be wanded by the security officer. One by one, with arms outstretched, cold plastic and colder eyes brushed our eleven-year-old bodies. When the security guard came to me I raised my arms, looked at the wand and said earnestly: \u201cI didn\u2019t know we had one of those!\u201d He scowled and passed the squawking device up and down the length of my body and told me to sit down. By the end of the period we were told that the morning\u2019s hand writing samples had positively identified the student who claimed to have a bomb. There was no bomb, but that probably didn\u2019t save that kid from juvie.<\/p>\n

I am still surprised that they were able to go through the hundreds of essays that fast. Homeland Security hadn\u2019t been invented yet, so perhaps the FBI had helped. Who knows? Before college I had gone through my fair share of bomb threat drills and memorized the color-coded alert systems printed on the back of the teachers\u2019 IDs. You never wanted a black alert. Yellow was nice though; it usually meant you got to watch Remember the Titans<\/i> until the lockdown was over.<\/p>\n

Last week, Nona Willis Aronowitz wrote a piece<\/a> and did several interviews about the rise of \u201cactive shooter drills\u201d in suburban schools. These drills are meant to help law enforcement and school administrators prepare for the kind of disaster that was once unthinkable but now seems more like an eventuality. Aronowitz\u2019s quotes are chilling not because they demonstrate just how gory a school shooting (even a simulated one) can be, but because student participation in these drills fits so nicely into the long list of activities good students are expected take part in:<\/p>\n

Kiera Loveless, 17, who has done eight drills before, \u201cthought it would be fun at first. Now I wouldn\u2019t say fun exactly\u2014it\u2019s scary. But a good experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loveless signed up because she thought it would look good on college applications. The first time she participated, she was \u201cterrified.\u201d She\u2019d only heard gunshots on television. \u201cI didn\u2019t even really have to pretend. I kept having to remind myself \u2018this isn\u2019t real, this isn\u2019t real.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Co-hosts Molly and John Knefel discussed Aronowitz\u2019s reporting on last Wednesday\u2019s episode of Radio Dispatch<\/a>.\u00a0 They rightly pointed out that these drills contribute to a normalization of school shootings, and could do more harm than good. Molly makes the excellent point that while \u201cschools that are already militarized\u201d will probably have to bear even more shooter drills and increased militarization, suburban schools will begin to treat mass shootings like a tornado or some other unstoppable and unpredictable weather event. John agrees: \u201cIt\u2019s a very depressing signal of what schools are going to continue to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Treating human action like the weather\u2014naturalizing it so as to negate, obscure or excuse individuals\u2019 very conscious actions\u2014is nothing new. Karl Marx noted that the assignment of an exchange value to goods and the ebb and flow of commodities markets relied on a belief that these were natural phenomena. The belief that the price of a diamond is just as natural and indisputable as the crystal-forming properties of carbon is essential to capitalism. That is why faith in markets and in the future of this thing we call an economy is so important. If enough people agree that something isn\u2019t worth the asking price, that price will fall. We like to think of that as the \u201cnatural\u201d function of markets: something that will happen unless something like the government actively intervenes to \u201cartificially\u201d set prices. The truth of the matter is that all prices are a function of governments\u2019 enforcement of contracts and the active and sustained collusion of corporations with one-another and other planetary governing bodies.\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I bring up Marx because, as John Knefel says, school security is probably \u201ca great business to be in right now.\u201d And as Molly notes, \u201cyou can never find more money to invest in school lunch, or raising the eligibility for free and reduced lunch, we have to make sacrifices \u2026 but there\u2019s always money to run an active shooting drill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, there are very concrete ways government agencies can assure that there will always be money to arm a guard but not feed a child. As much as we like to say \u201cyou can\u2019t put a price on human life\u201d corporations and governments do it all the time. It\u2019s actually essential to the way the government regulates industries and justifies expenditures.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, despite what the U.S. Constitution says, we are not all equal in the eyes of our government. The same person\u2019s life isn\u2019t even the same price from agency to agency. A 2011 New York Times article<\/a> describes how the government\u2019s \u201cvalue of statistical life\u201d indexes factor into regulating industry:<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>\u00a0set the value of a life at $9.1 million<\/a>\u00a0last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the\u00a0George W. Bush administration<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Food and Drug Administration<\/a>\u00a0declared that\u00a0life was worth $7.9 million<\/a>\u00a0last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of\u00a0cancer<\/a>\u00a0victims.<\/p>\n

The Transportation Department has used values of around $6 million to justify recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The higher the price of a human life, the more money a government can justifiably spend or demand that a corporation spend on saving that life. That must make you wonder then, if the EPA can value a human life at $9.1 million, how much does the Department of Defense value your life? Depends on whether or not you\u2019re the one used in justifying the fighting or the one actually doing the killing. If you\u2019re killed in active service, your family typically gets $600,000<\/a>. If you\u2019re one of the millions of Americans that are being \u201cdefended\u201d by the armed services, your life is virtually invaluable and thus justifies the most expensive military the world has ever seen. We see a similar disparity in how we fund schools: As children that need nutritious food, life is cheap. As potential shooting victims their lives are invaluable.<\/b><\/p>\n

While the EPA still pegs human life at around $9.1 million, there are plenty of instances where that dollar figure gives way to much more unforgiving formulas: for example the exemptions to the Clean Water<\/a> act given to companies that frack for natural gas. Here the calculus is all about who could afford to scientifically prove that ground water is tainted and then fund a legal team to sue for the cost of piping in clean water. Even here, it doesn\u2019t remediate the damage or even stop the hazardous drilling. It only keeps that one person relatively safe from harm. The rest of us are left to defend ourselves against the dozens of loopholes and unenforced regulations that make it possible for coal ash<\/a> and nuclear waste<\/a> to seep into groundwater by the ton. Tucked away in the actuarial tables of high-rise office buildings and unassuming office parks are what companies are willing to pay when<\/i> something goes wrong and it kills you. These numbers are disturbingly low. They have to be low. How else could you account for the sheer volume of last year\u2019s industrial disasters? Here\u2019s an abbreviated list of spills and explosions that happened just in North America:<\/p>\n