A Cry For Help

Our nation’s students are crying out for help. Their cry tugs at our heartstrings like that of a baby crying. We want to help, but, at times, feel helpless. As a baby is demanding something from the “old” people around them, the students are demanding something in hopes that the “old” people around them can and will do something. 

There is not a sane adult in the nation who is not moved by their cry. However, marching and making this demand is like demanding tornados to stop, hurricanes to cease, and flood waters to recede. 

If I beat my head on a rock, and then march to make the process of banging my head on a rock painless, I could have sympathy nods and agreement that I should live a pain-free life.  Someone would need to step up and tell me that the pain I am feeling is normal for someone who beats their head on a rock. 

There is a reason for the shootings in our nation’s schools, and it will not be solved by controlling guns, posting guards, or locking doors. 

If you flip through the television channels any given evening, you will see several programs focused on violence, demeaning women, and sexual confusion. Young people spend hours playing video games, viewing pornography, and investing in social media “relationships.” This generation has spent so much time in the pretend world that the real world becomes a scary and unknown place. 

In many cases, they want to hit the off switch or the reset button, but there is none. 

There is no possible way to spend many hours absorbing such things and have peace, love, hope, and more come from your life. In fact, the opposite is happening. 

This generation has learned this self-centered pretend life from the generation that went before them. The parents of today have grown up absorbing the pretend while ignoring the reality. They can spend time at home, together, and not be together. Relationships are being built on physical presence, while the mental and emotional presence is elsewhere. 

This relational disconnect is what should be protested, and it can be something that is corrected. Perhaps we should outlaw absent fathers, which seems to be a common denominator to many of the shooters. Maybe our children should march demanding that their parents invest more real time with them, rather than just physically being there and providing for their transportation, housing, food, and laundry services. 

As a former teacher, I can positively state that there is a correlation between well-balanced, confident, contributing students, and parental involvement. It is the single most crucial factor in the growth and development of a child. 

We need more teachers to demand parent-teacher conferences, and to talk to the parents about how they are doing, rather than how their students are progressing. 

Adults are consistently behaving in a way that has adverse effects on children. Our prisons are full of people who were drunk while committing a crime. Our health system is overwhelmed with people who are dealing with effects of alcohol or other drug addictions. We have a problem with obesity in our nation, and our social service servants are overwhelmed with parents who decide that drug usage trumps being with their children. 

In our nation, political correctness is king, so everyone needs to act as if we can do something, in the school, to solve the school’s problems, when the real problem has never been the school, but the home. 

We need to get back to a dad and mom (male and female) committed to God and to each other who lead our nation’s families. We need to get back to a country that is one nation, under God, instead of one nation composed of many who want to be God. 

We need to limit the pretend, and maximize reality, or we will be in danger of living in a fantasy world of our own making, and we will miss out on the reality God for which intended and equipped us. 

There is no possible way for our nation to experience positive change without change. It is time to change, and the change needs to start with every adult who has contributed to this mess in which we find ourselves.