Well, get ready for the anti-rural Pennsylvania
pile-on. I just read the story about the school superintendent at Blue Mountain High School suggesting that having each
classroom equipped with a bucket of “river stones” to throw at potential school
shooters is somehow a valid defense against this ongoing wave of semi-automatic,
schoolhouse genocide.
The really strange part of this for me? You need to be from there to gather this (and
I am from Schuylkill County). Blue
Mountain is, by far, the best school district for miles around, in county or
out. I didn’t go there. In fact, I often disliked kids from Blue
Mountain when I ran into them my two years at the Penn State branch campus in
Schuylkill Haven. (Blue Mountain is to
Schuylkill Haven as Cinderella is to her sisters.) There might have been Catholic schools that
rivaled Blue Mountain for academic excellence, but this was a public
school. They were always the best high
school in the county, and they still are now.
Those kids would carry around a sense of entitlement on
campus, and it was irritating. Actually,
the Pottsville kids, too. (Pottsville is
the county seat, and I would guess the largest school in the county.) It was that “south of the mountain”
smugness. (Schuylkill County is divided
in half by the Broad Mountain, with the general concept that the north half is
a bunch of factory-working rednecks, and the south side the more refined “upper
class” of the working-class county.
There really is no comparable community or school on the north side to
Blue Mountain. Then again, there are south-side
towns like Minersville, St. Clair and Pine Grove, among others, that are
virtually identical to “north of the mountain” towns. It’s possible the dichotomy exists because of
the infamy of Shenandoah, the north-side town permanently known for its
well-earned, rough-and-tumble image. Call it the antidote to Blue Mountain. That ‘Chendo toughness embellishes the entire
“north of the mountain” image.)
Some of the Blue Mountain kids would carry themselves around
with that “Big Man on Campus” vibe. They
were from the best school district, and the Penn State branch campus was in
their backyard, on the edge of Schuylkill Haven, just down the road on Route 61
from their tasteful country homes, usually helmed by two college-educated
parents. The thing is, when I got out of
high school, I was hoping to ditch that vibe, anything to do with one bunch of
kids seeing themselves as superior to all others, a malady that made high
school such a shit endeavor.
I recall one English class, reading some forgotten passage
out loud, and two kids from Blue Mountain snickering at me for my Coal Region
accent. I would later befriend these
guys, but they came off like James Spader in an 80s teen flick when I first met
them. Never mind that I left that place
with a 3.9 grade average, one of those guys flunked out and the other muddled
through on the six-year party plan. In
their minds, I was a redneck because of the accent and where it indicated I was
from. (As it turned out, my eclectic
taste in music, particularly all those great 80s indie bands, cemented our friendship.)
In my book, I get into being on the golf team, and how we
always got out asses horrendously whipped when we played at the prestigious,
much-harder golf course at the Schuylkill Country Club. This was Blue Mountain, and those kids were
raised playing that course. Us playing
there was like the scene in Caddyshack
where the caddies take over the country-club swimming pool for the
afternoon. We didn’t belong there, in
more ways than one!
Moving on to the main Penn State campus, then the world in
general, then New York City … I look back now on that whole north/south of the
mountain divide and laugh. It is
laughable in the overall scheme of the world, but I’m sure, is still a very
real thing for the people who live there.
It might be a matter of degrees, but it matters. That’s why I was mildly surprised to see Blue
Mountain in this news story about the “bucket of rocks vs. AR-15 assault rifle”
insanity. If the story had said Tamaqua,
Schuylkill Haven, Shenandoah or any other town around there? Yeah, that would have made more sense in my
mind. But Blue Mountain? The gem of the county? I suspect people not from there think that
school superintendent is some Li’l Abner caricature, running around in bib
overalls and a jug with XXX on it. Not
realizing that’s an extremely smart individual running a highly competent
school district. How this bucket of
rocks thing entered his mind, I don’t have a clue!
It’s not fair to say I hate it when people dump on rural
Pennsylvania. I do it myself
sometimes. And I think about it all the time. The people in cities who dump on
places like this, who aren’t from there, I can see, these people often don’t
know shit about life. They think they
do, but this vast blind spot concerning working-class white people, when they
are white, too, tells me so much more about them than anything else that will
come out of their mouths. It bothers me
much more when people who are from there, who know that environment, dump on it,
unapologetically, all the time, no looking back, fuck that place, fuck those
people, I’m in a much better place, thank you very much, look at me now, so
much better than all those dumb hillbillies.
No. Just no. You can’t reject your roots: know who you
are. I probably entertained those kinds
of thoughts straight out of college, in my mid-20s, but I quickly came to
realize, there’s just as many bad, shitty aspects of life you run into no
matter where you live, particularly cities, with their own special brands of
darkness and stupidity. We’d all be wise
to erase this upper-middle-class, suburban world view from our lives. It’s sterile and reeks of all the false
values I’ve come to reject in my adult life.
It’s permanent high school and the rigid caste system that ragged,
immature way of life implies. (Of
course, I recognize this is America now and will go on being this way for a
long time.)
As for guns and Pennsylvania – guns and any rural area in
America – don’t get me started. I’m all
for anyone in America having hunting rifles, antique guns, even hand guns or a
shotgun for home protection. Let’s make
another constitutional amendment to protect every American’s right to always
own this level of weaponry if he so chooses.
But let’s get rid of everything else.
If you’re worried about “the government” breaking down your door and
taking you prisoner all because you’re not toting semi-automatic weapons and
semi’s converted to machine guns, you don’t need to find yourself another
country. You need to find yourself
another fucking planet. If the “end
times” come, the survivalists are right, and these armed-to-the-teeth militants
are the only ones surviving in their bunkers?
Ask yourself if you want to live with these folks. I’d rather go down fighting hand-to-hand with
the killer cyborg robots, winged skulls and nuclear mutants.
The last few years when I’ve visited Pennsylvania, I’ve noticed
something alarming. In terms of gun
ownership, I’m not crazy about one man owning dozens of guns. It suggests a level of fear and constant
state of paranoia that seems debilitating.
But I can surely live with that.
I have to – it’s the way things are in America for a lot of frightened,
deeply intimidated men. (This is the
greatest ruse, something I learned boxing: self defense is fear. Maybe fear that is entirely justified. But fear nonetheless. When you can admit that to yourself, that’s
when the lightbulb goes on over your head.
It’s all right to be afraid.) I
can live with the outrageous levels of gun ownership, but I’m having a hard
time living with the open-carry law.
I wouldn’t mind this so much if the few times I saw people
carrying guns in public they were staunch, dependable, John Wayne types. But that hasn’t been the case. The first time, my brother and I were getting
ice and hot coffee for the road at a Sheetz in Cressona, PA. Somebody called out my brother’s name, we
turned to see a chunky dude in a camo hooded sweatshirt and pajama pants approaching
him … with a .38 special holstered on his hip.
Apparently, this was one of my brother’s former coworkers. He had been fired for exceeding his absence
level at work (which takes some doing), was known as a bit of nut. I really needed no background on this. I could see in his eyes, no one was home,
much less hearing him speak and realizing this guy had mental problems, surely
not enough to be institutionalized, but enough for daily meds. And he’s openly carrying a hand gun in
public?
The handful of times I’ve seen this since then, while I
didn’t have this level of direct contact with the person, I wasn’t overly
enthused to see some hard-edged, scowling, middle-aged dude sporting a
holstered hand-gun on his hip … in the St. Clair Walmart parking lot … walking
down the main street of Ashland … coming out of a Dunkin Donuts in Shamokin,
etc. Like we were in the Old West, and
this guy was going to have to draw on a cigarillo-smoking desperado in black. You can read me off all the statistics you
want. This is way out of bounds and
totally unnecessary. I’ve lived in New
York since 1987 and lived in a crack-ridded neighborhood in the Bronx from ’87
to ’97. If I put myself in the mindset
of these dudes openly carrying guns in a comparatively safe rural area, I would
have been walking around with a flamethrower those 10 years. It wasn’t unusual to hear gunshots in the
distance at night in that neighborhood, and there were a few notorious murders
in my neighborhood. You learned fast
what to do and what not to do to avoid trouble.
Your mind was your greatest
weapon, developing the traits and abilities to avoid meaningless, violent
confrontation. Not a gun. (Granted, there are situations, urban or
rural, where a gun could save your life, but they’re surely not an every-day
aspect of existence, and something I’ve thankfully yet to encounter.)
So, think about the superintendent and the bucket of rocks
in Blue Mountain. If anything, this is
the antithesis of our gun-crazy culture, albeit more than a bit nuts. Biblical in a sense, like Davey slinging
rocks at Goliath? Only in this case, I’d
rather not go up against some deranged 15-year-old with an AR-15 assault rifle
… with a bucket of rocks. I don’t like
those odds! Nor do I like the concept of
arming teachers. Teachers don’t strive
to obtain their degrees and dedicate their lives to broadening the
possibilities for children with the thought of one day gunning them down in a
crisis situation. The concept of armed
teachers is the antithesis of education: it’s more like prison. And the few teachers I knew in high school
that would have been comfortable handling guns in school were people who scared
me nearly as much as the thought of some unhinged kid on a shooting spree.
Then again, there’s a lot I no longer understand about high
school and this horrible, dark strain of shootings that has somehow become
normal in our society. We used to have
fire drills. The bigger end of the
baby-boom generation, those kids would have nuclear-attack drills, hiding
under their desks when the alarm went off, waiting for Russian warheads to rain down on them. Kids are doing the same
thing now, only they’re hiding under their desks when the alarm goes off,
waiting for a psychotic American teenager with a semi-automatic weapon to kill
them.
A few years back, when we were staging our 20th
high-school reunion, I went back to the high school for an informal tour. (The concept was to gather as many people as
possible the Friday before a Fourth of July weekend, but I was the only person
who turned up!) I hadn’t set foot in the
high school since graduating.
Approaching the front door, I was shocked to realize it was locked down
(even in July). There was a camera on
the far wall overlooking the far-left door, which appeared to have a
buzzer/intercom set-up. I pressed it,
announced who I was and why I was there.
The woman at the front desk in the office buzzed me in, then escorted me
to wait for the principal.
The tour went fine. It
was amazing to walk through that place again and have the teacher guiding me
grasp that not a lot had changed culturally there in the past 20 years. But that front-door buzzer stuck with
me. Back in the 70s and early 80s, you
just walked right in or out. There was
no need for lock downs, shooter drills or armed guards. Then again, at that point in history, there
were relatively few, if any, school shootings on record, and only a handful of
mass shootings serving as templates for what would become societal norms
decades later. Is there something wrong
in our society that horrible scenarios are now the norm? Obviously.
And the concept of dozens of people, particularly kids, being murdered,
would be a lot harder to envision without semi-automatic weapons. (Imagine what Charles Whitman would have done in that tower in Austin in 1966 if he had one instead of a hunting rifle. Then again, you don’t have to, as Stephen
Paddock did just the same in 2017 in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding
422 others.) A bucket of rocks doesn’t
seem any more or less sane against those kind of numbers.
