All I can Hear is SIlence

Friday morning I woke up thinking about my children and the plans for the Holidays. I turned on the news and there was this horrific scene of police running around a school. There was mothers and fathers rushing to a fire station to find their children.. there was shrieks and screams of children crying because they where scared. I heard the news that every parent in America dreaded. Another school shooting had just happened.. Another senseless act of violence had happened.


School shootings have been around since I was a child. In 1999 it was Columbine, I was only 11.. after that there is to many to name. I am sickened to think of all the lives that have been cut short due to someones selfish desire to make a name for themselves , or too sick to even care. I feel like my innocence was cut short worrying if someone was going to come and shoot me. After seeing the horror on TV as a pre-teen I wondered if I was safe. We would do practice lockdown and we would have police come and talk to us... We would plan for the worst, we would drill and get the idea that this could happen. My sophomore year I was in my Biology class when over the speaker we where under a bomb threat and that we needed to evacuate... At that moment I gathered all of my things and left with the class and stood outside. We stood in the parking lot as the sirens drew closer.. and all I heard was <strong>silence</strong>.. I saw my classmates worried.. you could see the teachers concerned.  After about an hour outside we where all released home. The parents shuffled here and there and I walked home. That night my parents and I had a talk about how we are all blessed to be here and that we all need to be thankful for each day we get. Ten years later I am blogging about it.. I would never imagine that 10 years later I would be writing about this...

Later that evening I got onto the phone with my father.. I cried with him on the phone and asked him why? Why would someone go into a school and kill 20 innocent children!! My father was quite on the line. He didn't say a word.. We talked about faith.. we talked about illness... we talked about how things where when we where children. It doesn't matter what race we are .. It only matters that we need a change. We need sick people treated, we need people screened more carefully when getting a gun licence. Parents need hope that sending their children to school will mean that they will come back on the same bus... That we will be able to watch them grow up. But because of that man, there is 20 children being laid to rest. 20 lives cut short. We blame the man who killed them, his illness... But we can't just blame him.. we need to blame everything. The way the world is.. We need change.. What change it will be, I am unsure. I just hope that this change means I can watch my children grow and not have to bury them early.