There was an active-shooter scare near my house this week. You probably didn’t hear about it, because it ended up being a false alarm. Guns rule this country, and it’s hardly a story anymore when they do go off, so it’s definitely not a story when they miraculously fail to materialize. I saw the choppers hovering in the sky while a nearby hospital was on lockdown, and I wish I could tell you I freaked out over it, but I more or less rolled eyes and grabbed a snack instead.

That was not the only false alarm. Prior to Thanksgiving, we got an e-mail from our school district saying that an anonymous caller had phoned in a threat against our children’s elementary school. They called the cops and had them sweep the building for guns and bombs, but the search fortunately turned up nothing. And again, I went on with my day. The idea that, at any moment, a fucking psycho with an AR-15 could come storming into my child’s school and leave a trail of small dead bodies in his wake was not a new fear for me. That fear has been there for a long time, and it’ll be there for even longer. It’s a normal fear now. It’s sensible, given the circumstances. And so for the sake of my own kids and for the sake of my sanity, I do my best on a daily basis to maintain a facade of normalcy—to keep a poker face—when tragedy has a decent chance of striking any second.

This is wartime. This is what living in wartime is like. I know that America is not in the middle of any kind of official Second Civil War, and I know that this nation enjoys keeping its official wars at arm’s length…all the better to conjure up bogeymen to keep the war machine healthy and profitable. I know there are not bombers overhead and lines for bread. I know that America doesn’t get slapped with the handy label of “war-torn,” used by nearly every media outlet as a convenient keyword for any third-world country designated as pitiable in their eyes.

But I don’t know what else to call it when day-to-day life in America means living under CONSTANT threat…of guns, of perverted democracy, of hate, of menacing climate effects, of bombs mailed to ex-presidents, of a lunatic president just dying to plaster his name all over history, and of so many other horrible things. Synagogues are being shot up. Entire towns have been decimated by fire, as if napalmed. Children are being gassed, and media outlets favorable to the state are cheering it on. Drug companies are killing people outright, and no one is going to jail for it. This is not a peaceful country. It is being ravaged from within. There is war touching people here.

“Living in wartime means aristocrats secluding themselves and laughing it up…a bunch of Neros fiddling along to the fires they set outside. Living in wartime means going about your day-to-day business as best you can but still planning for the moment when it all goes away.”

Perhaps this isn’t the brand of wartime you see in movies, or the kind you heard about from relatives who lived through an armed conflict with some official title appended to it. This is wartime of its own ilk. There is a war on facts and a war on law and a war on Earth itself going on, and while those are wars only in the abstract, their side effects mirror the real deal: trauma, death, insanity, and fear that the walls are closing in. That fear in America is real, and it is ever-present: the fear that one day all the bad shit going on will find YOU, if it hasn’t already. Living in wartime means learning to be comfortable, or as comfortable as you can be, with being adjacent to horror. Living in wartime means keeping a happy face for your kid’s sake even when there’s little to be happy about. Living in wartime means fearing every knock at your door. Living in wartime means aristocrats secluding themselves and laughing it up…a bunch of Neros fiddling along to the fires they set outside. Living in wartime means going about your day-to-day business as best you can but still planning for the moment when it all goes away.

I feel dumb sending my kids off to school in America, sending them ANYWHERE in America, and that’s because this feels like wartime. I know that sounds dramatic, especially compared to the strife other people in the world have lived through and are, in fact, fleeing in order to find a better existence here, despite the gross hostility they face from some of my countrymen. My angst is a privilege compared to what others have suffered through (particularly for so many women and minorities here who have, throughout America's history, felt as if war has been perpetually waged against them). But in 2018, the manifestation of that angst constantly feels as if it is at hand. It feels like there are bombs going off all around me, and an even bigger one still in the offing. That’s not just standard overprotective parenting angst, not when kids are getting shot for real and grownups from the NRA are putting a target on those same kids when they dare to kick up a fuss about it. They just want you to buy the bulletproof backpack and shut the fuck up. Wartime is good business for gun companies, after all.