Beslan in America? You Connect the Dots

On the first day of school in September 2004, Beslan, Russia began a three day nightmare. Around 100 militant Muslim terrorists took control of the school and held it for three days. At the end of the seige, three hundred thirty four citizens were dead. One hundred eighty-six were children. It was the most horrific attack on schoolchildren the world had ever seen.

In the months following September 11th, clues that were either missed or not understood began being understood with a new clarity. Across the nation, pundit and experts could not understand how America’s intelligence agencies failed to “connect the dots.” There were men learning to fly, but not learning to take off or land. Reports said Osama was going to use planes in an attack. We have seen them all.

Now, a new series of dots are being connected, and it leads to a Beslan in America style atrocity. Here is a look at the clues that lead me to believe the next great terrorist attack will be against America’s schoolchildren.

I don’t have kids, but some months after 9/11 a school in my neck of the woods was surrounded by county police cars and many LEOs with shotguns, so I was perhaps sensitized to what a school takeover might look like. Fortunately (I asked one of the policemen at the scene), they were winding down on what he called “a domestic matter” which I assumed meant a child custody situation.

As for a potential Beslan scenario, most of the parents I’ve gently asked about school safety seem completely oblivious and/or in denial about it, at least with regard to terrorism. I’m not sure I understand the (seemingly willful and intentional) cluelessness. Maybe it’s just too darned painful to imagine one’s own kids in a takeover scenario, or “there’s nothing I can do about it” so shove it out of mind.

Just a few weeks ago I went a few rounds with a close friend about his freshman daughter, and maybe he should buy her a can of pepper spray just in case. Back and forth, back and forth, until it hit me that **he did not want to think about his daughter having to use pepper spray in self defense**. His arguments were weak, not rational, and easily refuted, but he kept producing new ones.

It seems to me that this resistance is actually psychological denial (not a “reason” I toss around easily), being played out by our society just as it is with individual parents as I’ve just described above.

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