Walking through the children’s books section at the local big-box store there are a ton of cute stories for modern children with dinosaurs, witches and wizards, farm animals and other objects that are cool to generation X and millennials.

Creeping onto the shelves more and more are books by cool celebrities such as Jimmy Fallon and Samuel L. Jackson.
Then off to the side are the nursery rhymes, golden books and stories that have been told to generations, which seem to cool to gain our attention.

It’s time to make those stories more popular.

One that was heard a lot growing up in our generation was The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Stories are common for children, and eventually those stories are turned into lies, and those lies become easier and more convenient to tell. What’s the harm, right?

Well that’s where Aesop’s fable came in.

The shepherd boy watching his flock of sheep wanted the villagers to come out, so he cried out “Wolf!” Wolf!” and laughed at the people who came running out.

After tricking the villagers three times a wolf came to dine on his sheep. This time the aggravated and desensitized villagers didn’t do anything.

Bye, bye sheep.

It’s a story most everyone knows. However, after the drama the students at Oxford College of Emory University were put through we think it needs to be made cool again.

Unfortunately no one actually talks to villagers anymore, but text, tweet, post and yik-yak. Those are the forms of communications that people pay attention to. Social Media is the news of the day.

When something comes across one of those social media platforms people listen.

So when Emily Hikari Sakamoto, a sophomore at Oxford College, said she would be “shooting up the school” this week, through the social media site Yik-Yak, and when the Newton County School System received Facebook and phone messages of bomb threats earlier in the school year, people were alarmed.

By the third time there was a threat against our schools, we could feel the mood shift to more people thinking they knew it was a hoax.

Even with Sakamoto’s threatening message, a fellow Oxford College sophomore, Yaw Kumi-Ansu, said “I didn’t feel unsafe. From the get-go, I knew it wasn’t serious.” Sakamoto herself was released on a small bond of $1,500.

With the amount of real shootings and violence that has been occurring in schools throughout the country, we feel that a $1,5000 for causing alarm, threatening students and quite frankly making light of the victims of those shootings, we see the $1,500 as a slap on the wrist.

Growing up, if we “cried wolf” and our tale put other’s at risk and disrespected those mourning, a slap on the wrist would have felt like a hug compared to the punishment.

So, wolf was cried, but there was no damage in this case, relatively no punishment and it wasn’t taken seriously by some because it was social media.

What about the next Twitter or Instagram that goes out saying we are threatened? If we ignore that one and something happens, the damage would be worse.

Maybe we should call the newest cool celebrity and tell them to write the story of “The person who Tweets terror.”
However, in this new updated story, we just hope that after the third post is sent out to everyone’s smartphones, the trend doesn’t become #byebyepeople.