Why do we lie to the children?
Joe Faulisi

We tell them about Santa Clause, The Tooth Fairy, and so on. We tell them that so that they enjoy their childhood, right, and I guess we tell them that there is no monsters, to protect them and to protect their innocence.

It is unfortunate that there is no Santa Clause or Tooth Fairy, but there are monsters. The monster may not always hide in closets, or under the bed, but they want to hurt our children all the same. They want to do things that are never to be told in fairy tales, or bed time stories.

We live in an unfair world, we want our children to have everything that we can give them, better lives than we had. We want them to keep their innocence and get an education. That should not be a hard thing to accomplish. There is something out there trying to stop this from happening, the monsters don’t want this to happen and some will go to great lengths to prevent you from the goals you set for your kids.

Another big problem is that the monster is evolving all the time, the monster is ever learning. It started with other children who may have been picked on for being different deciding to get revenge to a full on terror attack.

Our country has had a rash of school shootings throughout our history, and they were all horrible and tragic events. None of them should be forgotten or taken lightly. However we have been lucky so far, one death of a child is too much, but compared of some of the attacks that have taken place on other parts of the world we are lucky.

All around the world terrorist have attacked schools and have tortured and killed the children. September 1st 2004 Beslan Russia was one of these incidents, most likely one of the worst incidents of this kind to ever happen. Three hundred and thirty four people lost their lives including one hundred and eighty six children, approximately seven hundred more were injured over a three day span. The children were denied food, water, they were tortured, some were raped before they were killed, and others had to witness these acts. I’m not sure which would be worse.

Beslan was not the only time this has happened, and it is a matter of time before it happens here. Our soldiers have found plans of American schools in Al-Qaida bases; our law enforcement has found surveillance videos of schools and bus routes. Two Middle Eastern men were caught trying to get on school busses in Florida, several more in numerous areas tried to get jobs driving buses. The most terrifying is probably Osama Bin Laden himself on video giving orders for his men to carry out these attacks.

We have to do something about this, we have to train and prepare for the worst case scenario. We have to stop this from happening to our children. Terrorist want to strike terror into us, like they did on September 11 2001, but this time they want to hit us harder, why are our children their target. There is nothing that will strike terror like striking against what we care about most.

There are two major problems with the preparing to defeat this before it happens.

The first major problem will be that law enforcement is reactive not proactive. They are training and preparing for another Columbine or Virginia Tech, which we should prepare for, but if we prepare for a terrorist siege we would be able to handle a one or two man active shooter incident a lot easier. Training to deal with a three terror cell attack will be able to defeat the single shooter scenario, and maybe make the target hard enough to prevent it all together. If it is known that it won’t be easy because the local police and the school campus are ready, could be enough to discourage the shooter. Most active shooters want a high body count and a lot of publicity, there fifteen minutes of fame so to speak. The terrorist want the same thing in a higher volume, they may appear to be hostage takers, but they are there to kill.

The second major problem is the administration and politics of the school and the towns. Everyone thinks that “it won’t happen here”, or “we don’t want armed guards in our school our children will think they are in prison”. We cannot think like this anymore, the monsters are knocking on our doors and if we don’t take action now it will be too late. Everyone thinks that it will happen somewhere else, but somewhere else has to be somewhere, right. The terrorist will look for someplace that has no security, some small town that everyone knows each other. Small towns are soft targets, because the people are more trusting and don’t feel the need for higher security. They have a higher comfort zone.

People will say they will notice strangers, well what about delivery trucks or people traveling and just passing through. Believe it or not there are blond hair, blue eyed terrorist out there. 9-11 should have been a big wakeup call; Beslan should have been a big wake up call. We need to wake up, now before it’s too late.