Hickey: Keep calm, avoid spreading false rumors about bomb threats

The past week’s deluge of bomb threats has been — among other things — a royal pain in the… The past week’s deluge of bomb threats has been — among other things — a royal pain in the ass.

These are the times that try if not men’s souls, then certainly their patience. With threats now up to about seven buildings a day, even the students who write them off as practical jokes or grasps for attention now find themselves plagued with uncertainties about the most mundane aspects of their lives. Will I be able to meet with my TA before the test? Is the test even likely to happen tomorrow? How badly are all these lost hours on my work-study job going to screw up my paycheck? Will I be able to sleep in my own bed tonight?

In a surreal world where voicemail boxes are emptied daily so they don’t fill to capacity with ENS notifications, my friend Sarah, who works as a courier for an office in the Cathedral, now carries all her belongings with her on every delivery, because if she leaves them in the office she might not be able to retrieve them when she needs to. I know students living in the quad who have started sleeping in their clothes. The emergency situation has become the everyday reality around which we’ve all begun to structure our lives, necessarily planning ahead for the totally unpredictable.

Aggravation is melting into anxiety as late-night threats against residence halls make last week’s consensus — that the messages are coming from a handful of irresponsible students looking to reschedule their tests — exceedingly unlikely. No one, least of all me, knows who’s doing this or when the hell it’s going to stop. I write this with the earnest hope that the perpetrator is arrested tomorrow, rendering this column irrelevant before it can go to press. But sadly, it’s realistic to assume that not only will this not happen but that the threats will continue, perhaps even escalate, and we will continue to live under these conditions for some time yet.

Fear and anxiety are understandable. There are many reasons why a person would threaten to bomb a school, and most of them — seeking attention, for example — accord all too well with the reasons that motivate people to commit violent crimes.

However, where there’s an anxious population, there will always be those willing to take advantage of peoples’ fears. Take, for example, whatever jerk started the seemingly untraceable Internet rumor that Virginia Tech received 20 false bomb threats in the weeks before the infamous April 2007 shooting. That story isn’t true — there were bomb threats at Virginia Tech shortly before the shooting, but only a handful: between two and five depending on what qualifies as an independent incident. There was also one more that happened days after the shooting, for which the dead gunman Seung-Hui Cho could not have been responsible.

This may seem like a hairsplitting difference, but symbolically it isn’t. The rumor implies that 20 is a magic number, causing already-fearful students to speculate that Pitt will be attacked soon after we hit that mark (which we have). In fact, we surpassed Virginia Tech’s actual bomb threat count two weeks ago, making it unlikely that we are dealing with a methodical Cho wannabe.

An atmosphere of widespread fear breeds panic-exacerbating rumors the way a warm, wet climate breeds fungus. We all have a duty to each other to avoid propagating them and to research and challenge them wherever they appear. Your fellow students are already scared and on edge; those with anxiety problems or previous experiences of trauma have taken a serious hit to their well-being in the past few weeks. You owe it to them to do what you can to ensure that the information circulating amongst you is that of a true, verified and helpful nature.

Overall, I am very proud of how Pitt students have handled these threats.

Tonight, I’ve seen my Facebook feed overrun with off-campus residents pre-emptively offering their couches to any on-campus friends whose dorms might be evacuated. I’ve seen my peers embracing the morbid humor of the situation, cracking hilarious jokes about the Chamber of Secrets and Pitt ENS resembling a clingy girlfriend, while still remaining steadfast in their support of the administration’s prioritizing safety over convenience, even as we pass into the double-digit threat count.

And most of all, I’ve seen my fellow students echoing this message: Keep going. Keep your eyes open, keep your wits about you, but keep going to class, keep doing your work, keep participating in and leading all the awesome initiatives you’re known for. We might be pissed off and frustrated and scared, but we won’t be pissed off and frustrated and scared out of doing what we came here to do.

After all, as Sarah said when nonchalantly explaining that, yes, her backpack is heavy, but she has two papers due this week, and she can’t afford to have her laptop stranded in a locked-down Cathedral: “We can’t not live our lives.”

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu