{"id":4264,"date":"2012-12-18T01:13:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T07:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=4264"},"modified":"2012-12-18T09:17:24","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T15:17:24","slug":"obligatory-post-on-recent-school-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2012\/12\/obligatory-post-on-recent-school-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Obligatory Post on Recent School Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday, 16 December 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0In the wake of the terrible tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, our biggest concern here on the homefront is how best to stockpile our weaponry with a bleeding heart liberal of a president breathing down our necks<\/del> to deal with this with Owen.<\/p>\n

He’s quite anxious, nervous, and sensitive about violence and harm befalling children. He recently watched about 5 minutes of some 1970s B-movie (on TV one weekend afternoon) and saw a baby get killd in some natural disaster, and now he’s been upset about it ever since. He comes downstairs 10 or 15 minutes after going to bed and cries to us that he can’t get the image out of his head.<\/p>\n

So…the recent murdering of 20 elementary school children would surely weigh far, far heavily on his mind.<\/p>\n

We’ve decided not to tell Owen.<\/p>\n

The problem is, not all parents of seven-year olds are sure to feel the same way. And that’s just fine; I’m not deriding their parenting. I’m sure some kids out there can handle this sort of news, and I’m sure many parents are probably thinking, “Well, I better tell my kid, ’cause I don’t want them finding out some other way.” But the thing is, even if mom and dad are discerning as to whether to tell their kids, I don’t think the same can be said for the kids themselves. Bottom line: there’s a good chance Owen would overhear the news on the playground tomorrow.<\/p>\n

The other problem is, we live in the information age. We don’t blare the radio news in our house, we don’t subscribe to any newspapers, and we only turn the TV on when we have a specific show to watch (even then, we mute the commercials). But even with all that, it’s tough to keep the terrible news from Owen. Just this evening, in fact, we turned on the TV to watch the season finale of Survivor<\/em>. Thanks to the NFL, it was delayed, so when I turned on the TV at 7:00, 60 Minutes <\/em>was airing. …And they were airing a story about the shootings. We shut off the TV for a half hour (until Survivor <\/em>was supposed to start), but then there was live broadcast of President Obama’s address…about the shootings. Two hours later,\u00a0just before the host announced the winner of <\/em>Survivor, he\u00a0requested a moment of silence out of respect for\u00a0Friday’s victims. My quick thinking wife switched to a different channel momentarily.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Jennifer was in touch with Owen’s teacher and one of the school counselors this weekend, and the latter\u00a0recommended keeping Owen home from school tomorrow. There are no plans at his school for an official meeting or discussion of the events, but it will likely be a topic on the lips of many of the kids throughout the building.<\/p>\n

I am curious how other parents of 5-10 year olds are handling this, or plan to handle this. I checked on Facebook for some insight, but since I try not to read posts written in all caps or exceeding three exclamation marks<\/a>, there wasn’t much rational content there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday, 16 December 2012 \u00a0In the wake of the terrible tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, our biggest concern here on the homefront is how best to stockpile our weaponry with a bleeding heart liberal of a president breathing down our necks to deal with this with Owen. He’s quite anxious, nervous, and sensitive about violence and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4268,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264\/revisions\/4268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}