M is for Madness

    It is Monday, April 15, 2013.  Here in my neck of the woods there was a threat made to the local schools.  Supposedly someone wrote on a bathroom wall at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles that on this day 20 children would be killed at one of the schools.  It didn’t say which one.  It could have been anyone of them in the county I live in or the next.  The police and school administrators were put on high alert and the media got a hold of it and in my opinion caused mass hysteria.  To my knowledge, no one was killed today in any of the schools.


     I got my kids up this morning as I always do and helped them get ready for school.  I packed their lunches.  When it was time to head out to the bus stop and say goodbye, I found I couldn’t do it.  Tears filled my daughter’s eyes.  She was terrified to go to school.  I couldn’t let her or my son go.  I couldn’t say goodbye to them not knowing whether they would return safely to me.  That is a horrible feeling.  Perhaps one of the most horrible feelings I have ever felt.  I called my daughter’s school and spoke to the principal.  He assured me that that would have a police officer there….one.  He assured me that the kids would be under lockdown and would not be allowed to go out to recess.

      I found myself asking “Can you assure me that my child will come home to me safe and nothing terrible will happen?”  There was silence on the phone.  I answered my own question.  Of course you can’t.  No one could answer that.  I asked then “Do you believe one police man can keep 800 kids plus staff safe?”  Again, my question was met with silence.  He had no answers for me.  In the end it was my call.  I made the executive decision that an education could wait another day.  It was more important to keep my kids safe and my sanity intact.  They are my world.

        I wonder tonight what kind of world we live in with people bombing the Boston Marathon and threatening kids in schools.  How awful is it that people have to be scared to send their kids to school or that kids are scared to go?  How awful is it that a marathon can’t be run and the athlete’s accomplishments celebrated without some nut bombing and killing people?  People say we can’t live in fear.  Still with the madness that we hear about on a daily basis on the news and the madness that happens in our own neighborhoods, I think it is better to be safe than sorry.