Duck & Cover

A nice little game of Hide-n-Whimper:

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged. "The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip."

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said. "I was like, 'Oh My God,' " she said. "At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out."

Oh, waaaah! My entire generation was regaled daily with dire warnings that the Soviets were going to turn us all into flash-fried kidlets. But everything would be all right, we were told, if we cowered under our particleboard desks. Those things are nuke-proof, you know...

A dose of minor trauma now and then is healthy for the little squirrels. Good for the circulation and it keeps 'em on their toes.