When I was growing up, I loved school. I may have been a bit of a troublemaker, but I loved going to school. I loved being in the classroom. I loved my teachers, though I am sure a lot of them would have been surprised to know that. School was one of the places where I felt most safe. I knew when I went there that no one was going to hurt me.
Today we have children who are systematically terrorized in schools by ALICE training. If you think that your teacher giving you instructions on where to hide, how to be quiet, not to cry, when to run, and how to grab a can of soup to throw at a shooter to protect your classmates isnt terrifying to a child, you are lying to yourself.
Once there were children that had to huddle in the halls because of fear of atomic bombs. From far away, in another country, someone might drop a bomb on the school. The idea was remote. The school in the town next to you never got bombed. The drills were like fire drills. Your school didnt catch on fire. It was a moment out of the classroom. The fear that your school was going to catch on fire at any moment didnt exist in your brain.
Now we have kids who live in fear every day that someone sitting in their classroom is going to bring a gun to school and kill them, their brothers or sisters, friends or their teacher. And this is a REAL fear.
We cant go to movie theaters, the mall, a concert, even church without the fear of being killed by someone with a gun. As adults, this is scary. As a child, who is just learning about the world, it is not only terrifying: it is an insult to humanity.
As the most advanced and civilized country in the world, we should hang our heads in shame. That legislation to pass stricter gun laws, to outlaw automatic weapons, and to make the safety of our children and our people the top priority has not passed says a lot about the United States.
There are those who argue that guns are not the issue. And maybe theyre right.
Greed is the issue. Our government has been bought and paid for by the NRA. As a result, we have children who are now heroes because they chose to save their classmates from shooters. High school heroes used to be the kids who scored the winning touchdown, or who raised the most money for a charity. Now they are heroes because they died in a school shooting.
No other nation has this problem. When mass shootings happen, gun laws are changed immediately. Magically, mass shootings stop. Nearly 40,000 people died from gunfire last year. Between January and April of this year, there have been 105 mass shootings. Ten mass shootings have occurred in May of this year.
That ALICE training is seen as something that needs to be done, that better security is needed in our schools, that we need to be vigilant and brave when going to our places of worship, that we need to all carry a gun, and that we are told that we can control our world by doing all of the above is wrong. How can we raise children to be kind, generous, thoughtful individuals, when from the day that they enter school they are trained to not be killed while they are at school? This is Terrorism 101. We should be motivated to make real change. I am so deeply saddened that this is our America. That any child had to sacrifice his life to save his friends says a lot about the heart of that child. That he had to do that at all says a lot about ours.
Kindness matters!
