Six months ago, Amendment II introduced a new line of backpacks, built with the company’s signature carbon nanotube armor, designed to keep kids safe in the event of school shootings. Since Friday’s massacre at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, sales have gone through the roof. “I can’t go into exact sales numbers, but basically we tripled our sales volume of backpacks that we typically do in a month—in one week,” Williams says. With thoughts of defenseless children seared into the national consciousness, the company doesn’t plan on letting the crisis go to waste. “We want to be sensitive to how we do that, but we are gonna try to get the word out that this product does exist that there are ways to at least provide our children with some protection,” Williams says.
After last week’s random mass killings at Clackamas Town Center mall here in Portland, and three days later at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, CT, it’s understandable that people are scared. No one wants to be the victim of random, senseless violence. No parent wants to send their children off to school without being secure in the knowledge that they’ll return home safely. As difficult as it is to process and understandwhat happened in Newtown, life goes on…because it must. We recoil in horror, we grieve, and we figure out how to pick ourselves up on get on with life. In doing so, we’re left to determine how we’ll move forward- in fear that we or our loved ones may be next, or in defiance and refusal to cave into the debilitation fear brings with it.
It would seems we’ve chosen fear, and by doing so we’ve decided to allow that fear to dictate that we engage in all manner of overreaction. This being America, there are businesses ready, willing, and exceptionally able to capitalize and monetize that overreaction.
Time was when Americans didn’t live in fear. We reacted, worked our way through our grief, and then got on with it. From my perspective, the horrific, epic nature of the 9.11 attacks that changed something in our collective psyche. It seemed we realized that there really are people out there who want to destroy us, and that destruction can be visited upon us anytime and anywhere. Now we live in fear of the unknown and unseen threats we perceive to be all around us. That there ae media outlets like Fox Noise Channel to help feed this collective paranoia only makes matters worse.
It’s almost understandable that in the wake of the Newtown Massacre, parents from coast to coast are seeking ways to protect their children from the same sort of attack. A new growth industry in the wake of all this tragedy is the manufacture of bulletproof backpacks. There’s no doubt that the horrific, searing of innocent children murdered hits us at a very deep and primal level. Children are the apotheosis of innocence and hope for the future; they should be able to live without care and certainly without fear. Most of us would give our live for our children. Still, the message sent by providing body armor to children is one of fear and trepidation. I find myself wondering how long it will be before we’ll hear cries to arm children?
We need to teach our children that there are bad people out there. What we shouldn’t be doing is teaching them that they must live in fear. Between demands to arm teachers and administrators and the idea of providing body armor to children, I’m left with the vision of our schools turning into armed camps (and we only thought schools were prisons when I was growing up). Is that really what we want to create? Do we really want to teach our children that they must live in fear and that the only way to protect themselves is to allow that fear to dictate how they live?
I realize that it’s easy for me to say these things. I didn’t lose a loved one, nor did I witness something so horrific as Clackamas Town Center or Newtown. Still, someone needs to be a voice of reason. If we choose to live in an armed camp, we’re teaching our children that fear is the norm, and being afraid of bad things bad people is the only way to stay alive.
That’s not living. That’s surviving. We’re better than that…aren’t we??
