Many years ago, I spent a few nights in a hostel on the outer edge of Edinburgh, Scotland. I was there alone, but had a great time exploring the city by day and then resting in my little cubby in a shared room at night.
On my third or fourth night, an alarm went off in the building. I got up, grabbed my purse, put on shoes, and immediately went out the nearest exit, heading down to the bank of the small river behind the building. I waited at the far end of the lawn, alone for several minutes before the alarm stopped sounding. No one else came out at all.
When I walked around the front of the building and was let back inside, I asked what happened. “Oh, the alarm does that sometimes,” I was told. “It’s no big deal.”
I was confused, “But what would have happened if there had been a problem?”
I was assured that everything would have been fine. There was nothing to worry about. Just go back to sleep.
While this probably seemed like nothing to them, it was a big deal to me. I was only a few years out of college, which I attended in North Carolina. In my high school years, two different colleges in NC had residential building fires in which students died. By the time I was in college, fire drills for dorms were mandatory and frequent. In my school, the drills were timed. The building had to be emptied in less than three minutes. Alarms in buildings were (and are) something serious to me.
Yet, here I was in a different country having a very different experience. Yes, there was an alarm, but no one was alarmed. And my experience wasn’t meaningful to the people in front of me. And since it wasn’t known or meaningful to them, they weren’t able to tell me what would happen if there was an actual problem.
What is the point of this story?
There are currently a lot of alarms sounding. Alarms about violated laws and norms. Alarms about vulnerable people and populations. Alarms about harm being done- publicly and in secret.
Some people are ignoring the alarms. Some people are dancing to them, like music. Some people are trying to shout over them and trying to bring attention to them. Some people are saying this just happens sometimes.
All I know is this: an ignored alarm is not the same as a false alarm. It’s better to check what’s happening and take it seriously, than to act like it’s nothing. There is almost always some action that needs to be taken. Talk to other people as well. Which alarms are they hearing and what is their experience with alarms? Everything is not fine.
Alarm bells are ringing. How are you responding?
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