A threat - to terrorize

Last week was a rather short schoolweek as Wednesday was the last schoolday of the week. The reason was Ascendant Day… which always takes place on a Thursday, and is a day off here. With Thursday off there really is no point in going back to school for one day… most have already set their mind on a long weekend, and I suppose the world knows by now we Norwegians even postponed end of term tests because Justing Bieber’s consert coincided. (I know there are many rumors it was cancelled, but that is not true: It was postponed.)

No need to arrange an end of term test you know only half of the students will show up for. The hassle of arranging two is just very inconvenient and expensive.

So, this Friday off is another convenient thing as well; not a holiday for religious purpose.

As it turned out, Wednesday became quite an eventful day.

The department, where I work, is in the same building as the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organisation (NAV), and on Wednesday they received yet another bomb-scare, the third one this year, and we had to evacuate our students (for the first time) because of the threat...

We didn’t really get a lot of information, but we, the teachers, focused on keeping calm so our students would not be frightened by the armed terror police. They are 16 and older, but even though they are on the threshold of being adults, they still need the insurance only adults can give; we play the ”lived-a-long-life” card and tell them the police is on top of things and that we just do as told: trust them, and everything will be ok. To some even that is a challenge, but it is ok to show the teenagers it is true. (Police is never armed here, in any way, apart from in situations like this.)

I found out my year in Israel 23 years ago, was a great advantage. I think I was even calmer than the police themselves. Hah… of course I was: they were on the alert! They took the situation seriously, I discovered later I lulled myself into a state of refusing the possibility it was for real.

So we waited, in the rain, with our students. They needed to go back in to fetch their stuff so they could go home, and the police needed to clear the building before anyone entered. It wouldn’t have been a problem if only the students had brought their busfare card, money, keys to their cars/mopeds/motorbikes… but they didn’t; they left the building as told, and so they had no possible way to get home… we don’t encourage them to hitch-hike.

An hour later I talked to the police and the students who had their car keys were allowed to take their cars from the parking lot and leave. Half an hour later we were told we could sluice the rest of the students into the building, to get their stuff, and we could send them home.

This is like stories we hear from across the Atlantic, or in some other European or Eastern country, or any country anywhere else but here.

In spite of what we have experienced of evil, what we want is no one to pick on others, we want everybody to be good and nice, and with that as basic guiding rules you can do whatever you want… more or less. You don’t have to be friends with everybody, but you can still be friendly and polite.

After all the school shootings over the years in the U.S., administrators have established plans. They have police officers at the schools, tighter security for getting inside, fences, etc. There is actually debate about putting police officers with weapons inside schools to help curb any violence. We don’t want that. We want our schools to be safe, in every aspect.

To me the bomb scare was a rather surreal incident. Even though it was a very calm and undramatic incident, it made me think about huge tragedies. Most started with a phonecall.

People tend to not take them seriously because there are so many. They evacuate buildings, etc., but no one is really scared. Neither were we. We told jokes, talked about future plans, we talked about how the students felt about their school year now that it is almost over. It was rather nice, actually.

For some reason more and more people seem to think that to threaten others is an acceptable, alternative way to express their own profound frustration and/or rage: Regardless of whether the target is a company, an organization, a person or even just random people. To express you want to kill someone, not just take lives, but to do it by inflecting as much harm as possible, purely because they do their job, or just because they happen to be at a set place, is to me to terrorize.

I read a paper published by an Indian student; I think he put it very well:

From Old to New Terrorism: The Changing Nature of International Security

Mahdi Mohammad Nia
Department of Defense and Strategic Studies
University of Pune, India

“New terrorism takes religious and apocalyptic ideologies as its main motivations to action. The new terrorists have ambiguous goals on the systemic level and value destruction for its own sake. For the new terrorists the means are the ends. The old terrorism was comparatively intelligible, limited, precise, and frequently connected to territory, therefore making the political, cultural, or social grievance more susceptible to bargaining.

New terrorism seeks to kill as many people as possible and is specifically drawn to weapons of mass destruction. By contrast, the old terrorism targeted specific groups or institutions and was limited in its means. Old terrorism preferred centralization, hierarchical organization, and skilled personnel, but new terrorism is decentralized, more networked, and inspiration-driven, which opens it up to amateurs and nonprofessional “fighters.”

            http://globality.cc.stonybrook.edu/?p=149

It describes how come many feel they can be inconsiderate and mean enough to predict worst scenario possible as a tool to make a point. I know there is a big difference in threatening to do something and to actually carry out the threat. But to each individual who has to deal with the emotions which occur because you may, or may not, face real harm; that can very well break a person’s spirit. To do so is just not acceptable.