Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Follow the Leader


When I found this photograph of some students being lead to safety after the shooting, I just looked at it for a moment; just imagining "What if these children had no one to lead them to safety?" 

When I woke up in the afternoon and clicked on the television, seeing the Sandy Brooke Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was not the first thing I wanted to digest before my breakfast. The last shooting I remembered was when  a man went into a movie theater and shot people during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. So hearing about another man going into an elementary school and shooting almost everything in his path just blew my mind.
I had talked to my mother a few minutes after seeing the news and she being an Early Childhood Education teacher hearing about young children being shot, well it just broke her heart. One thing she had said to me though, really stuck on my mind. She said that "Little bitties, being six and seven years old don't know where to go or what to do when things like that happen. They're just scared." And then I questioned no one saying "What if these kids had no teacher to lock them in a closet or lead them to safety before the "bad man" came after them. I then thought about my little brother who had just turned seven years old. He was a smart boy and could easily tell the difference between a joke and a lie. But, God forbid if he were to be put into the same situation as the kids at Sandy Brooke, what would he do if his teacher had not been with him and his classmates? Where would they go, what would they do? What would you do if you had to protect a room full of twenty or more children who were not your own, but your responsibility between the hours of seven and two thirty? I'm not saying everyone needs to be a hero, but that you always have a choice to lead or follow. What would these kids have done if they did not have a leader?

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