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
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.”
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.
