(Twenty mornings! Score!)

This morning I am thinking about yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, following a full day of teaching, and right on the heels of a vapid and hollow staff meeting (“Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ all at once to everyone who’s had a birthday in the last two and a half months! Then, as a special gift, the birthday people can cut this crappy cake we got for them! Also, teachers with high test scores win all the prizes! Yay math and English!” Except with less energy and verve.), we had an interesting and useful training. It was called Stop the Bleed, and it was about how to deal with critical bleeding, how to apply first aid, tourniquets and wound packing and pressure and the like. I was glad to get the training, because I learned things I hadn’t known before, things that could be useful in a crisis, and I learned them from actual medical professionals and first responders.

But there were a few things that bothered me. Apart from the graphic wound photos and the fake detached limbs with enormous puncture wounds for us to practice stuffing gauze into. Geesh.

The first was the audience participation; we were asked to identify some signs of critical blood loss, and also some consequences of it if left untreated; there’s nothing quite like hearing a bunch of teachers, who are all lovely people, and who also want to be the one to give the teacher the right answer, shouting out, “Spurting blood!” “Missing part of a limb!” “DEATH!” The flip side of this was the trainer’s comment that our practice hemostatic gauze lacked the chemical additive that is in actual hemostatic gauze, which helps cause blood clotting, because our gauze was “educational.” I love the idea that the crappy knock-off version, the one that doesn’t do the critical thing that the actual product does, is the educational version. It’s like school Chromebooks.

Then there were the trainers’ unintentionally strange comments. (At least I hope they were unintentional…) “We are fortunate to have the experience of the military, so we’ve seen tourniquets applied for up to two hours without loss of limb.” “They have tourniquets for the torso now so you can apply them to the lower abdomen, but unfortunately they’re only for the military at the moment.” (I think they had a different understanding of “fortunate” than I do. Is the military really fortunate to have the opportunity to field-test tourniquets for hours at a time without losing limbs? To have access to abdominal tourniquets? I mean, I’m all in favor of saving lives — but “fortunate?”) The better one was the trainer’s attempt at humor: when explaining that wounds to the “torso junctions,” where the limbs meet the trunk, at the shoulders, neck, and groin, the trainer said, “Now, you can’t apply a tourniquet at these places  — although I’m sure many of you would like to…” which is either, if she was talking about the groin, the weirdest and most inappropriate dick joke I’ve ever heard, or else she was joking about us strangling our students to death, ha, ha, ha. It’s especially disturbing that the murder joke is by far the more likely.

That’s especially disturbing because the impetus for this training? Sandy Hook. The program was put in place after the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, because at that horrible scene, the paramedics could not reach the victims in time to stop their critical bleeding because the police had to secure the scene before the medical personnel could be allowed in to help. So that means two things: one, this training is being given to me because, if the worst happens, I’ll already be in the unsecured scene, and so will have nothing to lose  by applying first aid to people who are bleeding to death, because I will already be in mortal danger myself. And two, that means we were sitting in the library of my school, at the end of a day working with students, talking about when a psychopath brought an assault weapon to an elementary school and murdered more than twenty people, most of them under the age of seven: and at least some of those people died by bleeding to death because the paramedics couldn’t be permitted in to reach them.

And this, this, is how my nation and my school respond to those facts, those unspeakable horrors. Not with gun control, not, in the case of my school, with hiring a full-time security guard and nurse: no, no. With training for the teachers in how to apply a combat-tested tourniquet, and how to pack gauze into a wound — gauze that, I learned, comes with an x-ray opaque strip so that once multiple yards of it are shoved into the wound, the gauze can still be found and removed in the hospital. Where the firefighter teaching us pointed out that we had to be careful putting our fingers into the wound because there might be sharp shards of bone inside, or even a bullet — which, he said, would still be sizzling hot.

All I can say is, God bless America.