Picture this: it is an overcast, chilly fall morning. You are sitting in class, minding your business when suddenly, you hear the most terrifying doomsday siren come over the speaker system. As you watch the teachers and students’ reactions, you come to realize this is just the new alarm they have chosen for the fire drill. You prepare yourself to become part of the stream of the crowd scrambling to get out of the building as quickly as possible and escape the blaring, flashing alarm. 

You ask yourself, why did they choose that noise? Was it to incite fear in students? Was it to underscore the urgency of the situation? Personally, you think such a noise is an unnecessary addition to an already-stressful situation.

When asking students their thoughts on the new fire alarm sound, people recall it feeling “like [they were] in the Purge” and “dystopian.” One student says, “I felt like I was Winston in 1984… it was Orwellian.” This should be proof that our school is slowly attempting to normalize such sounds so they will not come as a shock to us in future years. 

This new fire alarm is obvious evidence that we students are being subjected to a secret administrative agenda that is priming us for a dystopian future which we do not want.