While I was celebrating Winter Solstice with two of my granddaughters, we began talking about the levels of fear and anxiety that students are experiencing each day when they go to school. Because of the shockingly large number of school shootings over the past two decades, children have far more stress than dealing with bullies and keeping up their grades. My older granddaughter, who has just started high school, told me that her school had their first lock-down drill last week. She was out sick that day, but she said her friends were very frightened even though it was only a drill.
When I was in elementary school, we often had duck-and-cover drills. We had to hide beneath our desks and cover our heads. This was in preparation for a possible bombing by Russia, with which the United States was in a cold war. A cold war is a state of heightened tension between two countries due to mistrust and rivalry stemming from a wide gap in their political beliefs. It hovers on the unstable hope that their irreconcilable differences will not escalate into an actual attack. The warring between nations seems to be always going on somewhere in the world, whether cold or otherwise. While the children of today have much to be concerned about, I would venture that the Jewish children growing up during the Holocaust, knew a terror that we cannot even begin to imagine.
Throughout history, children have suffered at the hands of older generations that sought to control the world. Why should it be so difficult to attain peace in the world? Why can’t adults choose to get along and show their children how to live in tolerance and harmony? School shootings are a direct symptom of the disease of violence that children of the current generation have been exposed to. It is time to put a stop to the violence. It is time to become the peace we wish to see in the world, in ourselves and in our children.
