My Impromptus today has many subjects, beginning with a painful one: mass shootings. Kids receive training from an early age in what to do during a shooting — during an “active shooter” scenario. A report from the Associated Press yesterday was headed “Michigan State students’ training kicked in during shooting.” The report contained this jarring fact:
For some students, it was not their first experience with a mass shooting. A few attended Oxford High School, where four teens were killed 14 months earlier, on Nov. 30, 2021, some 70 miles west of Michigan State.
I would like to publish some reader mail — beginning with this note, this memory:
My elementary school in Detroit, Jay, held regular air-raid drills, where we all trooped down to the plenum chamber. Fire drills had a different tocsin, which meant: Get out of the school.
Another reader writes,
. . . you mention that the active-shooter training kids get in schools nowadays would have been unthinkable and unnecessary when you were growing up.
Yes, true. I’m probably just a couple of years older than you, and we never would have thought of active-shooter training.
But you know what training we did get? We got it for bomb threats. In junior high and high school, we had at least two bomb threats a week. (The frequency did diminish as the ’70s wound to a close.) We got very good at evacuating the buildings and knowing what not to do during a bomb threat.
A little memory, from me: My dad was a kid in Washington, D.C., during the war (World War II). They had a variety of drills, in anticipation of attacks from the Japanese.
Maybe one more note, from a reader:
Fifty-one years ago, I was a freshman at Penn State. Summer of ’72. I was walking in to take my calculus final when I noticed a bomb-scare flyer on the door, stating that someone had threatened to blow up the building. You could postpone your final or enter at your own risk.
I asked an upperclassman what to do. He said, “Don’t worry about it. Someone doesn’t want to take his final. It happens all the time.”
On college campuses, we’ve gone from bomb threats to get out of finals to mass shootings for no reason. Very sad.
Sad and outrageous and mind-boggling.
Turn to lighter matters? Okay. In Impromptus yesterday, I had the following item:
On Twitter the other day, Michael Beschloss, the historian, quoted FDR, speaking in 1934: “Are you better off than you were last year? . . . Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?”
Like you, I bet, I thought of Ronald Reagan, debating President Carter in 1980: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” I wonder whether he got it from FDR (a hero of his, as for a great many).
A reader has sent me an article by Ralph Keyes, published in the Washington Post in 2006:
The most stirring line of JFK’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” echoed similar exhortations made by many others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and President Warren G. Harding, who told the 1916 Republican convention, “We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.”
(Isn’t the sentiment terribly unmodern, by the way?)
N.B. In 1916, Harding was a freshman U.S. senator, giving the keynote address at the convention that nominated Charles Evans Hughes.
And let me mention something further about JFK’s inaugural address. Once, someone said to Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter, “Did you write the inaugural address?” He answered, “Ask not.”
(I had a talk with Sorensen once. Very sharp guy, obviously. Kennedy once called him his “intellectual blood bank.” I certainly did not ask him about authorship — but I congratulated him on his quip.)
A friend tells me he has just read Louis Lochner’s Herbert Hoover and Germany (1960). The book quotes a speech that Hoover gave in Berlin in 1954: “Thanks to the spirit and courage of men under the leadership of two great mayors, you can, like the men of ancient Athens, hold your heads high and say: ‘I am a Berliner.’”
(For more on this speech, go here.)
Something else from yesterday’s column: I mentioned that Ron Klain (until recently President Biden’s chief of staff) said something that echoed “nattering nabobs of negativism,” Spiro Agnew’s pungent phrase (penned by William Safire). Writes a reader, “I always wondered why Safire didn’t go with ‘nattering nabobs of negativity.’” Wish we could ask him!
To all readers and correspondents: thanks.