The other night, I sat with my roommate and watched a movie where it shows clips of the world's first man on the moon and first moon landing. One of the main characters quotes throughout the movie that he'll always remember where he was standing and where he was when that moment happened, when Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind.
I began to worry. As a 20-year-old, do I have moments so special for our country like that during the time I've been alive so far? The only thing my roommate and I could think of was when Barack Obama was elected the first black president. That was the only good event that happened where we remembered. The rest were tragedies and they continue to be so.
I'm not saying that there aren't other extraordinary things that our country has done since I've been born. I'm saying that that was the only one we could think of in that moment, and that's sad.
As a millennial, I was only 5 years old when 9/11 occurred in the country I call home. It was something I didn't quite comprehend until I was a little older, that there were other people in our world who didn't agree with things we did, and instead of talking about it like we are told to in kindergarten, they bombed and killed people.
Growing up for us millennials, it wasn't landing on the moon or the first space shuttle that made us stop and think. It wasn't when the civil rights act was put into place and we were all reminded that no matter what color skin we have, we are all human and deserve to be treated as such. It wasn't the color TV being invented or the first heart transplant to take place. The thing we've grown up with is mass shootings.
From 1966 to 2012, the United States had nearly a third of the world's mass shootings. A third...
I watched a video on BuzzFeed called Me & Mass Shootings. It wasn't until I began to hear his words that I understood that we as millennials have grown up with mass shootings as something that was almost, dare I say, normal? Normal to the point where we assume the worst every time now, because that's how we have viewed the world and viewed the people around us.
On Facebook, two days later after watching this video, I hopped upon a picture of a little 3-year-old girl standing on top of her toilet at home.
The Mother from Michigan says, "I took this picture because initially I thought it was funny. I was going to send it to my husband to show what our mischievous 3-year-old was up to. However, the moment she told me what she was doing I broke down." Feeley wrote that her daughter was practicing for a lock down drill at her preschool, I repeat, her preschool. This position was to be taken place if a shooter came in the bathroom while she was in there herself. America's own 3-year-old children are learning to stand on toilets in case a predator comes in and decides to take her life with no complete reason behind it. America's children, and soon, millennials, we will have children of our own. If this little girl in 2016 is doing drills in her preschool for shootings, what in the world will our own children face?
"Kids are dying and nothing is done." After witnessing the Sandy Hook shooting on the news before school one morning, I thought it would be over. Because what country and what kind of people would allow something like this to happen again, if it happened to innocent children? But I was wrong.
According to Everytown For Gun Safety, an advocacy group, there have been 186 shootings on school campuses since Sandy Hook. Just on school property. I remember exactly where I was when the Aurora Colorado shooting at a midnight premiere for Batman took place. I remember where I was during the shootings at two military centers in Chattanooga. I remember sitting at my computer in the family room with my family while reading Elliot Rodgers blog and watching his video titled "Retribution." I remember watching and then realizing the boy I was looking at on the screen and listening to felt the urge to go and murder people in Isla Vista because he truly told himself he needed to. I remember these things, and I can't remember that some men were actually presidents of our nation.
BuzzFeed Eugene talks in his video that instead of reaching for a common goal, we are splitting into two. Think about it. We are fighting over the Second Amendment and how we should or shouldn't be able to carry a concealed weapon and while we are commenting, sharing and liking things on social media and voicing our opinion.....more people keep dying and more people start mass shootings. We are the United States of America, for goodness sake, and we can't even come to a conclusion on how to make this stop. I'm not saying that gun control will completely get rid of every single mass shooting or crime. Getting rid of the Second Amendment isn't even possible. What I'm saying, just like the mother of the little girl pictured above, is to amend it to a certain extent. To come to a damn conclusion.
In 10 years, when I may have children of my own, what are they to think? What am I to say when they ask why people shot 100 people at the same time for no reason? What are we to do when it becomes more than mass shootings?
I am now speaking to my peers, my friends and my colleagues. Look at your country. Look at the people around you. Look at what we are doing. Contact officials and speak to them about this issue, because sooner than later, us millennials are going to be those officials. I don't know about you, but I don't want my children to not be able to go to school because we no longer have enough protection for them. What if our world turns so upside down that our children will no longer have a childhood?
Soon it will be our children. Soon it will be us explaining to them that the world they were born into can be the most terrifying thing in the entire world. Soon we will be praying every night that when our child walks out the front door in the morning to go to school, they will return.
I will take action, because I want a better world for my children who aren't even born yet and for their children, and their children's children. I know none of us know everything about everything, but we can't let this continue to happen. Because if we do, it'll just continue to get worse and we will be the ones left to pick up the pieces, us millennials: the ones who watched it crumble.
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