Fortune for the day – “With true friends, even water drunk is sweet enough.” – Chinese proverb
My daughter stayed home from school yesterday. She wasn’t sick. She didn’t have anything special outside of school, to attend. She wasn’t ill-prepared for a test. My daughter is not a senior and it was not a “senior skip day.” My daughter stayed home from school because someone had made a shooting threat to her high school, over social media. We live in Florida and the demographics of our high school are very similar to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the horrific Parkland shootings occurred two years ago on Valentines Day. Despite our school principal sending an email of “assurance” that there would be extra police protection on campus, a lot of parents made the same decision that we did, and they, too, kept their children home from school. My daughter’s friend texted her that there were four kids in her first period class. Thankfully, blessedly, no incident occurred and supposedly arrests have been made, concerning the threats made on social media, but sending our children to school was not a risk many of us parents were willing to take. It’s hard to walk the fine line between not living in fear and anxiety, yet accepting the cold, hard realities of today’s world. I don’t know the answers to this terrible violence problem that we have in our country, so for me, right now, this problem remains solidly in my prayer box. And in the meantime, I will control what I can control. My daughter stayed home from school yesterday, for no other reason than we feared for her life and for her safety.
“There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.” – Napolean Bonaparte
“Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence.” – Jim Morrison
“In violence we forget who we are.” – Mary McCarthy
“If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolute night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands.” – Ernest Gaines