A Safe Place

Last month, a man walked into an elementary school and took away innocent lives. Sweet, sweet innocent lives of young children. It is so incredibly disturbing to me. Almost a month later and it still just weighs heavy on my heart. On Christmas, I imagined those poor parents and families whose children were not there to open their gifts. The stockings that were hung and never needed to be filled. Parents who didn't get to hear the pitter patter of  little feet before daylight or see their beautiful faces when they opened up their gifts. For those families, every Christmas, all holidays, everyday life as they know it is forever changed.

And where did this horrific event happen? At school. A place to learn, a place to grow, a place where we send our children to everyday, a place that is supposed to be safe.  For some children, school IS the safest place for them to be. When I taught in low income schools, many children had more security and felt safer at school than they did at home. And yet now my kids go to school where they are actually locked inside their classroom all day long and only their teacher is allowed to answer the door. I am not knocking their security, I am grateful that the school is going the extra lengths to make sure my children are safe. But how sad is that? .....that  I am actually grateful . Grateful because my children sit in a locked room at school for their protection just so someone can't come into their classroom and gun them down while they are learning their math facts.

And then today close to our community, there was another school shooting. Another child shot while at school. Another teacher injured while trying to protect students.  And all in their safe place. What is next? Are our schools going to end up looking like the airports' security system?  Will there be metal detectors and random pat down searches?  Do we need to offer programs on Bullying along with How To Avoid a Shooter? Is this the future for our schools that once offered a place of safety? 

I don't understand how we got here.  I don't pretend to have any answers as to how to make it better. And I don't want to argue about gun control, how to treat mentally ill patients, the catastrophic causes of bullying, or which part of society is most to blame. It's not that I don't have opinions on these topics or that I don't think they are important or relevant to these situations. But sometimes people get so caught up in arguing their point of view, defending their beliefs, and trying to prove the other side wrong that it results in more division. On these issues, many people take such a strong stance and then they refuse to see it from any other point of view. It ends up becoming more important to be right than to be empathetic, than to acknowledge the severity of the tragedy that has occurred. This just causes more hatred, selfishness, more divisiveness, and hence more tragedies.

The more I thought about how devastated I was in our schools' safety  and what the future may hold for my children, I realized that maybe they weren't actually as safe as I thought  and perhaps maybe there is a bigger picture of safety to be seen. Although I had seen schools as being a safe place, I bet there are a lot of children and grown adults who would disagree. Lots of things can happen to our children when they are out of our presence. At school our children can be bullied, made to feel inadequate or not as smart, feel left out, get berated by someone at the school, be treated unfairly, or be in an unsafe neighborhood where there are constant fights. I am not pretending that those things are  nearly as unsafe or deadly as shootings. However, I just realized the importance of helping our children to find their own safe place in a very unsafe world.

We send our children into a hazardous world every day. These kinds of incidents can happen anywhere, they do happen anywhere; movie theaters, malls, front yards, etc. We can not put our children in a bubble and protect them from physical or any other kind of harm. I can be cautious (without being paranoid) and teach them to be cautious as well. But all I can really do is pray for them and teach them how to find a safe place to go within themselves when things become scary and difficult. I hope that I can help my children create their own safe place by loving them unconditionally, teaching them to stand up for what they believe in while not degrading others for their own beliefs, and raising them with a faith so strong that they will have an immense sense of peace when nothing else is peaceful.