What has happened to the world we live in?

What has happened to the world around us?
There used to be a time when school related worries included unprepared tests, incomplete homework, upcoming sports trials, lost text books and occasional tiff with friends.
Since when did security issues and bomb explosions come into the picture?
But they are in the picture now.
On Monday morning all kids leaving for school arrived back home few minutes later as schools in Cantt and Defense area of Lahore were closed on government directive. All of them have been asked to beef up security. Since then, boundary walls are higher, security cameras scan all entrances and no one is allowed in or out of the campuses with out proper identification and search. If one happens to pass a school these days it resembles a government controlled, high security restricted area rather than an institution of learning. Keeping in view the fact that a fake bomb was planted in one of these schools last year; the steps undertaken are not unreasonable at all. The bomb mercifully turned out to be fake but the panic it created was real enough.
But that was last year.
What ever decency that prevailed in the minds of the terrorist up till last year has expired by now. Yesterday a bomb exploded in a university in Islamabad killing six and injuring several students.
I can not even begin to imagine the anguish of the parents whose children had left in the morning only never to return home again.
The price of education was never so high.
What kind of a crazy world do we live in where even schools and innocent children are not safe from acts of hatred and violence?
I am reminded of a phrase that I heard in Warner Brothers’ “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” that I was watching last week
“These are mad times we live in”
And I agree as Dumbledore had agreed by saying.
“Indeed they are.”