Mike Ellis, Morgantown
How would you react if you were locked inside your office building all day, wondering when some deranged maniac was going to kick down the door and start shooting?
Young people are justified if they worry about that scenario as they walk the hallways at their schools. The odds of such a tragedy may be extremely low, but that doesn’t make the fear any less real.
Most of us don’t go to work or the office every morning wondering if we will make it back home alive at night. The stress of the average job should not be multiplied
100 times over by a real fear of being killed or wounded. A young student shouldn’t have to carry that burden.
Perhaps we are living in a time of escalating violence. We can examine the reasons or the motivations for the tragedies. And we can argue that the reports of shootings have been exaggerated, creating some type of mass hysteria, but none of that will erase the fear of harm felt by the average student inside the classroom.
Having a target on your back, real or imagined, is not the American dream, particularly for vulnerable children among us. Maybe we remember nightmares that frightened us as children. For many young people today, however, those nightmares are real every time they enter a school building.
Perception can be seen as a reality, particularly in the minds of younger people who lack years of experience. Those who dismiss the student protests against violence fail to understand the pressure that exists in schools.
If your workplace is secure and your building is considered safe, count yourself lucky. Today’s students don’t have that luxury. They know they could be fatally wounded on any day of the week.
If we examine these fears from the perspective of young people forced to function inside a locked building every day, maybe we could better appreciate the level of stress they feel. Then we could see why hundreds of thousands of students are marching and protesting, demanding that the adults take action.
They are protesting because they see what has happened. Their fears are real.
We need to hear the young people’s appeals for help. And then we need to do everything possible to make our schools safe, instead of simply waiting for the next tragedy to strike.
