Dear Blake,
I’m a volunteer tour guide for several historic sites. One of them is a cemetery. My fellow guides and I are concerned — not to mention saddened — when we see children running around unsupervised, and standing on and climbing on the gravestones. Cemeteries are sacred places in which the dead should be remembered and honored.
When parents or caretakers allow children to use the cemetery as a play area, they fail to teach them respect for the dead or for the survivors who are visiting the graves of their loved ones. They also place their children in danger. Gravestones can fall or tip over. Children have been killed or seriously injured by toppling stones. Flat grave markers can be tripping hazards. When we caution parents about these dangers, we are often met with indifference.
Please urge your readers to take our concern for their children’s safety seriously and control their children’s activities in cemeteries.
Signed, Elgin
From Buffalo, New York
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Dear Elgin,
It is improper and disrespectful for children to treat a cemetery like a playground. The only solution is, to traumatize those little brats into submission. Here are some ideas. Have security there carry automatic weapons, warning the parents that if they don’t control their children, mom and dad will be riddled with bullets, tossed into an open grave, and the kids will be sent the nearest orphanage or sold to a foreign sweat shop. Or, inform the kids that playing in cemeteries really angers the dead, and since the dearly departed already went to either heaven or hell, which ever location juveniles eventually arrive at, either demons or angels will be waiting to beat their brains out. Or maybe this idea. Tell the kids that running through cemeteries, disturbs flesh eating zombies that loves “young snacks”. And lastly, a nightmarish threat may be more than enough to straighten those children out, so consider trying this. Warn those runts that misbehaving can cause them to get a 30 minute time out in a casket… laying next to someone who will be buried the following day. I hope this helps.
Blake