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A Letter to My Son to Set Things Straight
Irena Ioannou — GAZE
Are you also distraught every time students burst into their high school, gunning down anyone who crosses their path? Are you frustrated when you read analyses that attempt to justify what triggered the perpetrators’ “outburst”, by commenting that the shooter had been “rejected” by a woman, and how things could be different if he hadn’t been treated “unfairly”?
Have you noticed how these shooters are almost exclusively male? Do you ever wonder why? Don’t girls also get rejected or embarrassed by boys? Where then, is their murderous rage?
If history has taught as one thing, it is that violence is never the answer. Nor hatred. And there is a lot of hatred going around lately. People who look back at the old times, when the world made more sense. To them.
Raising sons was never easy. Today it’s even more challenging, since we must count on younger men to break the cycle of hatred and violence. As a mother of a teenage son, I’m deeply troubled by the mass killings in schools, and feel that this is the right time to put some things straight.
Dear Son:
Women are not brought into this world to applaud you
I was raised in a totally different era, and I have biases I cannot always overcome. I thought I was…
