I remember the day when the Boston Marathon bombing happened, I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it happened five years ago, because of the devastating images from that day that simply cannot be forgotten, and will never be forgotten.
I also remember the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, that took place only a few short months before the Boston Marathon Bombing. I remember because I was sitting in a cold classroom, as a freshman in high school, unable to process exactly what was happening on the news in front of me. It felt as if I was living in a nightmare, I couldn't believe that this was the world I lived in- a world where children who have barely begun their lives, were being shot mercilessly in their classrooms.
Fast forward to 2018, there seems to be a shooting or some type of violent act committed on a daily basis. In a city less than an hour from my hometown, there is a murder being reported quite literally every week, and honestly, even I began to not care anymore -"what else is new?"- I would catch myself saying. To me, this is not normal. Granted, we do not live in a utopian society, by any means, yet to live in a world where murder, and the shooting of innocent moviegoers or school children, is seen as a 'norm,' I'm sorry but there is absolutely nothing normal about this.
We as a society have trained ourselves to become completely desensitized to these events, to the point where there needs to be a minimum body count met for us to even care about what had happened. This should absolutely bother you if it doesn't already. It bothers me, especially because I will admit to being somewhat desensitized to the world around me. These violent doings should make your blood boil with anger, anger that nothing is being done in order to prevent these horrid acts, or at the very least to somehow lessen the frequency of a school day gone wrong. Yet, all we really do is look down at our phones, read a news alert, post condolence of some sorts on social media, and move on with our lives. As quickly as the news strikes, it dissipates into the wind and blows over until the next gust of violence sends momentary shivers down our spines.
I am not quite sure how we all became so desensitized, maybe it's because violence has become such a large part of our society that we do not even deem it important enough to care anymore. Maybe it's because we are tired of shedding tear after tear for events we don't have direct control over, or maybe because we know that no matter what action we try to take against violence, there is no stopping the inevitable. It is important that we as a society find our emotions again, and respond just as any human should when someone around them is being hurt.
If we continue to act like violence is just a part of our everyday lives, we will soon catch ourselves going through gunfire as robots; taking hits, and being completely unphased by our wounds.
