What Are We Doing to Our Children?
We taught kids to read, write, and dream; then trained them to hide, barricade, and bleed quietly while adults chose guns, cowardice, and silence over their future.
Guest article by Michael Cohen. Remember to follow him on Substack for more by clicking here. Michael just hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube! Subscribe today for free here and let’s keep the momentum going!
When I was a kid, the fire alarm meant one thing: a brief, glorious interruption of math class. We lined up against the wall, shortest to tallest, like some strange growth chart of childhood innocence. We followed the painted line on the floor, quietly, obediently, toward the gym or outside. I remember thinking it was half fun, half pointless. After all, our schools were built like bunkers: concrete cinder blocks, metal desks, steel chairs. Nothing that could burn. And the place they herded us into? The gym. The one room with wood floors. Brilliant.
But that was the extent of our fear. A drill. A bell. An inconvenience.
That world is gone.
Today’s children—Gen Z and the kids coming up behind them—don’t practice fire drills. They rehearse for slaughter. Active shooter drills. Lockdown drills. Barricade-the-door drills. Hide-in-the-closet drills. Flip desks. Silence phones. Crouch in your “assigned location.” Memorize where to bleed quietly so you don’t give yourself away.
Let that sink in.
We have normalized terror for children. We have institutionalized trauma and called it “preparedness.” And then we wonder why anxiety, depression, and rage are eating an entire generation alive.
This is not normal. This should never be normal. And yet here we are, again.
On Saturday afternoon, inside a classroom on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island, a gunman opened fire. Students were doing the most mundane, hopeful thing imaginable: finishing exams, studying, getting ready for a well-earned holiday break. Instead, two students were killed. Nine more were injured. All students. Six in critical but stable condition. One critical. One stable. Another with non-life-threatening injuries. Parents got phone calls no parent should ever receive. Friends watched gurneys roll past. And an Ivy League campus turned into a militarized zone, swarmed by more than 400 law enforcement officers searching for a man dressed in black who slipped in and out of an engineering building like a ghost.
Lock your doors. Silence your phones. Stay hidden.
Sound familiar? It should. Our children have been practicing for this their entire lives.
This one hits close to home for me. I have a relative currently studying at Brown. Thankfully, safe. But safe doesn’t mean unscathed. Safe doesn’t erase the sound of gunfire echoing through hallways. Safe doesn’t undo the image of classmates bleeding, of police in tactical gear sprinting past, of ambulances lining the streets. Safe doesn’t heal the emotional scars that will follow these students for decades: the friends who won’t make it to graduation, the empty seats in classrooms, the silence where debate and laughter used to be.
And as America once again does what it does best—offering prayers, brief statements, and then moving on—the rest of the world burned too.
Across the globe, on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, another act of senseless violence erupted. A place meant for joy—a party by the water, people celebrating the first day of Hanukkah—turned into a massacre. At least nine people were killed. Beachgoers fled in terror as gunfire cracked through the evening air. Stretchers. Sirens. Blood on the sand. This attack, rooted in antisemitic hatred, targeted people whose only “crime” was existing, celebrating, being visible.
Different countries. Different contexts. Same disease.
Violence has become ambient noise. A background hum to modern life. And our children are growing up fluent in it.
They know the drill better than they know the Constitution. They know where to hide, not how to hope. We tell them to dream big, then hand them bulletproof backpacks. We tell them school is a safe space, then teach them how to die quietly inside it.
And here’s the most damning part: none of this is inevitable.
Other countries don’t do this. Other children don’t live this way. This is a choice. A series of deliberate political decisions wrapped in cowardice, corruption, and a gun fetish masquerading as freedom. We have decided that the right to own weapons of war matters more than a child’s right to grow up without terror. We have decided that inconvenience to adults outweighs mass graves for kids.
How many more schools? How many churches? How many colleges? How many beaches, concerts, synagogues, churches, mosques, grocery stores, movie theaters? How many names do we need to read before we admit this system is broken beyond denial?
Every lockdown drill is a confession of failure. Every barricaded classroom is an indictment. Every child taught to hide is proof that the adults in charge have surrendered.
What are we doing to our children?
We are teaching them that violence is expected. That safety is conditional. That tomorrow is not guaranteed. And one day, when they look back on us—the generation that shrugged, rationalized, and moved on—they won’t ask why we were scared.
They’ll ask why we weren’t brave enough to stop it.
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Beautifully written. I have nothing to add but my sadness 😢
We are teaching them that our government does not protect them.