The Generation that Feared

I had a high school History teacher who told us that for every major tragedy that would happen in our lives, we would remember where we were when we heard the news. Maybe my mind wasn’t developed enough yet, or maybe I lived in my head too much(it was a wasteland of being unable to choose between *N SYNC, The Backstreet Boys, or 98°, in my defense), but I cannot for the life of me remember where I was when I heard about the Columbine High shooting. I was 11, and I don’t think I could wrap my head around it. Maybe it didn’t even register then what had really happened. I remember trying to make sense of it in the years to come, trying to understand why, trying to understand how, and trying to cope with a post-Columbine world. Imagine a world where you and all of your peers are punished for what two people 1800 miles away had done. It wasn’t pretty at all.

You could barely breathe, honestly. Everyone watched each other obsessively, wondering, judging, fearing each other. Normal kids were demonized before they had even done anything wrong, troubled kids were pigeonholed and presumed guilty without any consideration. I knew a few who were, and I admire them for still being strong, despite being further isolated because of misunderstood behavior. The fear, and the “What if?” was strong. You would think that kind of environment would change the attitudes of bullies, but with the internet becoming more mainstream, it only got worse. (If you think cyber bullying isn’t as bad as being bullied in person, please educate yourself about Phoebe Prince and Rehtaeh Parsons.) Luckily for me, I have never experienced a school shooting, or any other kind of mass shooting first hand, but I DID experience the persecution of being a potential threat to a school.

I was nearly expelled for something I never said, something a former friend and her little brother concocted to get back at me for no longer being friends with her. My life was nearly ruined because of a childish 14 year old, her immature 11 year old brother, and a culture of living in fear of violence in schools. The fear of our school becoming another Columbine gripped my school’s administrators, and they nearly kicked me out of school, all on the word of a girl who lied often, and her brother, who lied even more. Without any other corroboration or solid proof, my only punishment was landing on that list that administrators denied they had, but most definitely did: The students they had identified as potential threats to their school. I wasn’t a threat. As angsty and emotional as I was, my last thought was to hurt others. I was mostly content to hurt myself, and that wasn’t actually all that common for me. I wasn’t suicidal, and I’d never hurt another person. But that fear took over in an instant, and the suspicion never left, even after I graduated.

After Columbine, the blame game began. Video games, metal music, and violent TV shows were the usual suspects, but truth be told, even then I knew that none of those things were to blame. Still, at my parents’ insistence, I threw out my Doom CD-ROM and stopped playing Tomb Raider. I only played Legend of Zelda and games so innocent that even a five year old would have judged me for playing it(Purble Place, anyone?). I never listened to Marilyn Manson, but I turned down the metal I DID listen to, and only listened to it on my Discman. Though none were to blame, I was still being punished, just because two people who killed 13 people did. Music and video games do not determine the actions of a person. I played Doom, just like the Columbine shooters did, but it never gave me the idea or motivated me to shoot up my school. It didn’t encourage me to be violent. Neither did metal music. I still listen to metal today, and it hasn’t urged me to violence.

While the aftermath of a school shooting does become political for those nowhere near the epicenter, what about the students who grieve and suffer? Does the world around them immediately coming down with a political fever soothe them? Is it cathartic to them to listen to us scream about gun control and mental illness, knowing damn well that, if this country had just had the conversation already, this might never have happened? This country is so gun hungry that they roadblock any path to keeping children in schools safe. Mental illness is still so stigmatized that many are afraid to speak up or seek help. I didn’t seek help until I was 29, and I’m afraid I was too late and may be beyond help. No one listened, and I was afraid my cries would fall on deaf ears.

This generation, Generation Z, is the generation that eats Tide Pods, but it’s also the generation that every one before it has failed. The baby boomers destroyed the housing market so badly that not even Gen Z will be able to afford a house. Baby boomers and Gen X have dumbed down our education system. Gen Z doesn’t have adequate education. They are reading textbooks with watered down versions of history, or completely erased history. They don’t have access to everything they need to do better than us. Yes, I am a millennial, and I include my own generation in this. We are supposed to fight for something better. We have become the society where, instead of celebrating an achievement for humanity, we are too busy condemning someone for what they are wearing.

Someone close to me said that it was sick to politicize the deaths of children, and I do agree. But… how do you not?! We have been here time and time again, and NOTHING has improved. It has only gotten worse. Barack Obama once said, “There is a way for us to have common sense gun laws. There is a way for us to make sure that lawful, responsible gun owners are able to use it for sporting, hunting, and protecting yourself. But the only way we’re going to do that is if we don’t have a situation in which anything that is proposed is viewed as some tyrannical destruction of the Second Amendment, and that’s how the issue too often gets framed.” He’s right. Why punish responsible gun owners for what others do? While I don’t remember one instance where a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun, why should someone who is stable and follows their state’s gun laws be punished?

Why are guns so essential to Americans? I can understand that for some, they enjoy hunting, or need them for protection from the wild. I absolutely understand that. But the time for sympathy for passionate gun rights nuts has long passed. When your fervent belief that the right to own guns outweighs the safety of children, the time has passed to consider your delicate beliefs about guns. There is no justification for leaving the laws as they are when children are being murdered. These are isolated incidents with a common theme- they could have been prevented by everyone, including us.

Students who aren’t even old enough to vote are dying because we waste our votes on our selfishness. Many of us continue voting for the same people who continue to offer “thoughts and prayers” instead of solutions. So yes, unfortunately, school shootings ARE political. When Obama-era laws that could have been used to protect children from being murdered in schools are repealed by those who have received money from the NRA, how do you stop that from becoming a political argument? The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School deserve better than us valuing our right to bear arms over their lives. Just because our life may never touch theirs doesn’t mean we have the right to devalue it over a material object. It’s time to change, everyone, and really invest in the change- change for the better.

Parkland may not be the last school shooting- though I certainly hope the students’ vow to be the last rings true. I do believe we are the ones who can change the course we are on- and we need to. Where we are now cannot go on. As long as “thoughts and prayers” are the only offer or solution Congress will give us, children will continue to die in places they should be safest. The last place a child should be afraid to go is school. I know I dreaded school as a teen, and spent the first week of classes trying to configure the quickest and safest escape plan from each classroom I was in. Older generations had to worry about bomb drills in school, but we have to worry about being murdered in our seats.

Gen X and baby boomers are content to write millennials and Gen Z off as the dumbest generations yet, as entitled, lazy, whiny crybabies, snowflakes, and libtards, as infants eating Tide Pods and crying about Justin Bieber(fair enough, some have cried about Justin Bieber-not me, though). However, last I checked, we’re not the ones clinging to old ideals like security blankets and clutching our guns to us like teddy bears at night. You call us socialists, when all we want is for everyone to have a fair shot. We want people to live. We don’t want people to die because they can’t afford food or healthcare. We don’t want anyone to have to choose between paying bills, eating, or dying because healthcare is too expensive. Most of us understand that nothing is free.

We are some of the hardest workers, because we have to work three jobs to afford the cost of everything. We are drowning in debt and crippled by job markets expecting us to give more than we have to keep a job, a market that expects to pay us in “experience” or “exposure”. Baby boomers held one job for at least 25 years and got to retire with pensions. Gen Xers created start ups and dot coms that all burnt out before we could even work for them. We’re just here, hoping our paychecks last a week. We value sustainability and quality of life. We value having a life.

We believe everyone should have choices, and they should have a chance to live. We are pro-choice because we value the life of a mother as much as an embryo, and we know she is a human who deserves a choice. We’ve noticed that that seems to be the only time baby boomers and Gen Xers are pro-life. When children in schools are dying, all you can do is send thoughts and prayers and tell us that teachers should have guns in class(please equip teachers with supplied classrooms and adequate pay first). We are forward thinkers, we care about the future more than the here and now, and despite our failing system, we still aspire to lead lives and to improve the world for the future.

Now is the time for older generations to listen, and hear us. It’s time for you to change. We(and you) can’t go on like this. Your selfish obsession with guns and your selfish choices are literally killing us, and killing children. Allow guns to be regulated as a public health issue, just like everything else. Trust the data. You make up a noticeable portion of society, and we have heard you our whole lives. Now you need to hear us, and work with us. There is no need to destroy the innocence of children. They shouldn’t be holding their best friends in their arms as they die of gunshot wounds. I know what it’s like to lose a friend at a young age, and it scars deeply. It’s not your future, it’s ours. We are already damaged enough. It’s time to change.