Wise Words from a Utica College Student About the Lock Down

With the recent lock down and scare at Utica College, one student shares her thoughts from the incident, and has a very important message we should all try to remember.

On the morning of March 5th (Monday), Utica College went under Lock Down. As soon as the announcement went out, rumors started flying. And people started judging the situation. Let me just say, if you were NOT in the building, if you were not a part of what happened PLEASE don't make light of this situation. Lillian is a student at Utica College, and put up a post on her Facebook Page that I think we all need to see:

And she's right. If you weren't there, you don't know what it was like. This was a very scary situation for MANY parents and many students. Can you imagine hearing that your child's school is on Lock Down, and then to be bombarded with (false) rumors?! This was the case for some parents.

And on top of that, to have people making light of the situation or even JOKING about it... Already?! I personally wasn't there, I don't know what it was like to be locked in that building with no information from the outside. But I can tell you I'm sure I would be very scared.

I guess the reason I wanted to bring this up, is because I think we're lacking a lot of empathy. Not everyone obviously, but it's so easy to judge from the outside and we forget how to put ourselves in other people's situations. Hopefully we can take Lillian's words to heart and remember this if something like this happens again. Maybe we can take a moment and imagine if we were in that situation and how we would feel, and how we would feel if people were telling us that we are overreacting or making a big deal out of nothing. It's not nothing. And it's not something to joke about.