I Speak Life!

Another school shooting; this time in Santa Fe, Texas, claiming the lives of 10 people.  Just 2 days prior to the Santa Fe Shooting, a town just 10 minutes from where I live, Dixon, Illinois, had a school shooting in which the 19-year-old shooter engaged with a school resource officer who ended up wounding the shooter and stopping him from taking any lives.  That day, the 16th of May, got me thinking very deeply about all of these shootings, because that day my children were also on lockdown at their schools.  It hit close to home, and when things hit close to home, people tend to go deeper into thought about those things they get used to seeing hit the news feed every day in America. I am not just talking about school shootings in this blog, however.  I am talking about all of the senseless mass shootings that have occurred in America now for years.  If you look up the statistics, there are horrible school shootings and other mass shootings every year....

I am going on 42 years old in a couple of months, so when I was raised, a bit of a different approach was used.  In Junior High, they still had the paddle in the office for kids who made bad choices.  Parents and Grandparents alike not only required children to live up to a certain moral standard, but enforced that standard with impunity.  When you did wrong, there were consequences. Then, things changed for some reason.  We seem to live in a world today where parents and school officials may not lay hands on children like they did 'back in the day', and where children must be talked to using kinder and gentler language.  There are schools that have lost control of the children they teach because there doesn't seem to be repercussions for the students acting out and not following standards.  Kids don't care if they are suspended, and they stand up to their parents more than in previous generations because the parents don't reall...