The other night when Beth returned from swim practice, she informed me, “A lady in the bleachers said I was a really good swimmer!”


“You ARE a really good swimmer!” I replied.


“How would YOU know? You never watch me!”


Busted!! But the truth is, they discourage parents from watching regularly. And I watch her year round during three different meet seasons. But… here I sit tonight, watching her…


I brought my laptop for the repetitive times and was contemplating what to write about tonight. I also brought the newspaper and started off by reading it. The front page story was about one of the two people killed at the mall shooting that occurred last Sunday a mere thirty minutes away from my home. I had heard that the man that was killed had a passion for working with “troubled youth”.


He sure did… he had been one, and now he worked at the Gillis Home, one of the residential facilities in this area. It was at the Gillis Home that the first ATN meetings occurred over a decade ago. This young man had pulled his life together, paid his own way through college, earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and was soon to enter graduate school.


The boys at Gillis loved him. He understood them, and approached them “where they were”. There were poignant descriptions in the article about how the boys responded to the news of this young man’s death. Imagine, yet one more tangible loss for these boys… one more person that left them and one more example of how random and unsafe the world can be.


Not only that, but this young man could easily have redirected countless other boys and perhaps have prevented a similar senseless act of violence in the future.


An adjunct article described the killer as having been violent and prone to talking about “shooting people up” since he was a child. Imagine that.


To top it all off, the high school attended by our foreign exchange student was locked down for several hours today after a threat of some kind was written on the walls. That made the news, too. A 17 year old boy was arrested tonight.


OK, I have dedicated many posts of late to angry children becoming violent adults. I didn’t plan that, but what is happening in our society makes this topic front and center. Do you want more of this subject (I have an article about this I can highlight for you) or on to something else?



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