When childhood dreams and adulthood choices collide.
Pexels | Photo by Polina Tankilevitch.
There’s been another school shooting. Have we hit the wall and shattered the mirror yet?
My deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the three children and three adults who died at a Tennessee School. I feel deeply for all who have gone through previous school shootings once again triggered back into grief, fear, and rage.
Again.
Thoughts and prayers mean NOTHING.
Without action, thoughts and prayers sit in the air like a stale fart. It will diminish over time, and you carry on. Conveniently ‘forgetting” unless you were intimately affected.
This action takes leadership. Personal leadership with action to the rest of society. Personal leadership to step up and fight against the weaponization of humans, average citizens sitting in pressure cookers.
This cannot keep happening.
Something needs to be done with the gun laws. Something needs to be done to understand why this keeps happening and what is causing people–often the ones who are steps away from adulthood–to get to the moment when picking up a weapon of death and showing up in the spaces of our youngest humans seems like a good idea. Our youngest Americans are being killed for reasons most of us don’t understand.
We need to begin asking ourselves what we are missing in the lives of our young. What is causing such trauma, confusion, anger, and sadness? What are the seeds of so much rage and malcontent?
Do you remember yourself in the 3rd grade? Go find that picture of yourself. Are you smiling? Are you serious? Are you sad?
Guess what? You’re here right now with the ability to look at your 8, 9, or 10-year-old self. Look at your expression. Are you surrounded by people you love? Are you alone? Whatever way you see yourself in this picture, you most likely survived without fear of being terrorized by gun violence in your school. In your church or grocery store or the comfort of your home. You know, in a place where you are supposed to be and feel safe. You are here right now.
Don’t be indifferent. Don’t turn away. Don’t be afraid of feeling bad. Don’t be scared of change.
This is bigger than gun laws. Bigger than mental health. We are smashing through ideas of morality and consequence and sitting stuck in an existential crisis. We need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, what the hell are we doing? It’s time to dive into those thoughts and prayers we so easily toss around like a spread of cards.
Six new people have joined a school club no one wants to join.
It’s time to ask ourselves a few questions.
What do we do, and where do we go from here?
When will it be the person you love?
When will it be you?
#EndGunViolence #NoMoreSchoolShootings #LeadershipForChange #YoungLivesMatter #AskQuestionsTakeAction
DEBORAH BLAKE DEMPSEY, MS is the CEO & Founder of Human Being Human, LLC. Deborah is a Life Strategist & Transformational Coach, Writer, and Speaker. She is the author of The Hoppernots, an uplifting, can-do story about amphibians and other forest dwellers coming together to defeat a common enemy and is told within a diverse ecosystem teeming with life and purpose. Her mission is to engage healthcare and corporate leaders at all levels to fulfill their greatness in their professional and personal lives by helping them understand their motivational drivers, define their purpose, find their voice, and develop their potential. She brings to her coaching more than 25 years of experience as a healthcare leader, having held strategic, financial, and operational leadership roles in physician practices, academic hospitals, and for-profit healthcare settings. Deborah is particularly interested in working with leaders struggling with self-confidence, professional identity, and facing burnout.
She holds a BA in Social Psychology and an MS in Psychology from Southern New Hampshire University.