Safety First

I had planned to talk about a different subject today, but I'm going to save that for another day. Instead, I have to ask - what do we do?

In a world where we can take every possible precaution to keep our children safe, they're not. We can teach them not to talk to strangers, we can talk to them about the dangers of smoking, drugs, drinking. We ingrain habits of wearing seat belts and looking both ways before crossing the street, but how do we really keep them safe?

There was a family I knew when I was younger. Two parents, two daughters. One my sister's age, and one was a year older than me, so we did spend time together. Their mom, I always thought, was a little over-the-top. The girls were so overprotected, they couldn't ride in anyone else's car, they couldn't do sleepovers, they ate only home-made food, no school lunches for them. There were also rumors that they weren't allowed to have their haircut by anyone other than their mom, and they weren't allowed any friends that hadn't been pre-screened. They were however allowed to go to college, they even stayed in the dorms. (Although, on a side note, the oldest daughter's dorm was nick-named "the virgin vault".)

We can take all these steps and someone can still just erase all those efforts to keep our children safe. I grieve for those parents, brothers and sisters of the students in Virginia and know that they are all wondering why this happened. So am I.