What do an Ariana Grande concert, a nightclub and an airport all have in common?
They are all soft targets. They're filled with thousands, condensed into one place with far many more people inside than there are exits.
But what if someone were to wreak havoc and bullets on them inside this enclosed area? That nightmare became a reality for the thousands who have lost their lives in recent mass shootings and bombings.
It's incredibly difficult to even imagine what kind of fear those people felt at the very moment they heard the first bullet being fired. The ear-shattering sound that everyone recognizes, but doesn't want to accept they are actually hearing is something that will never be able to be removed from their memories. Hearing about these tragedies is also something that everyone else will never be able to forget.
We wait online as soon as those concert tickets go on sale to be one of the lucky few who snagged them before they sold out, but the first thought that comes to mind is "Will I be safe there?". Is that sad? Yes. But that is today's reality. Fear is instilled in our brains after seeing what has happened around the world in just the past ten years.
It's easy to let fear overcome us and force us to skip that concert, or cancel our spring break trip because we are too afraid to go inside a soft target. It's easy to miss out on a fun-filled night with our friends because we are too afraid to step foot into a nightclub just a few months after a mass shooting there. It's easy to break your tradition of going to Lollapalooza every year because you heard the Las Vegas shooter had two hotel rooms booked for that weekend right across from the main stage.
This is the mindset these sick individuals desire others to have. They want everyone else to feel the way they feel inside, lonely and afraid. That is the real reason any human being does something like kill nearly 60 people at a music festival; because they are lonely and afraid. They are afraid of the real world because they have not become what they had hoped to be, so they want to bring everyone else down in an effort to make themselves feel powerful, for once in their life.
But we can not let this control our lives. We can not break our Lollapalooza tradition or skip that spring break trip and miss out on all the memories that could have been created just because some lowlife instilled fear in our minds.
Yes, it is scary to know that there isn't much we can do to prevent incidents like this from happening, but why let the fear of something so unlikely to happen to you stop you from living your life? You are more likely to die bicycling than you are to die in a terrorist attack. There will always be a possibility that it could happen to anyone, but there is also a possibility that you could die from choking on food (which is proven to be more likely than dying in a terrorist attack), but no one lets that stop them from eating a meal.
