I want to start off by saying I feel incredible sadness over the tragedy that occurred in Orlando and my thoughts go out to every single victim and their family. In the face of this horrible event, I do not want to share any anger for the system, or the laws that may have influenced the situation. Don’t get me wrong, in the wake of the shooting I feel anger, just like most of America, but for me, the anger is significantly overwhelmed by sadness. Like every other mass murder that has struck the United States, there were victims. People, who had families and friends who cared about them and relied on their presence in their lives, were ripped from us for reasons we cannot begin to fathom. Even those who survived will forever be changed, either physically or mentally by the events that they witnessed. For me, the realities of the victims and their struggles are the part of this tragedy that I cannot overcome, and that haunts my thoughts.

I recently read a book detailing the experiences of survivors of mass murders, and one part of the book has truly stuck with me. One survivor talked about how they did not refer to the shooter’s name because talking about the shooter gave that person power and remembrance in society, remembrance over the victims that shooter took away from us. This statement haunted me because of the truth behind it. Looking back at all the mass murders I have either learned about or heard about, the names and faces I remember are not the ones of the victims, it is the shooters. Of course the reality of numbers plays a role in this; it is easier to remember one or two names of a perpetrator than it is to remember all the individual people that they killed. However, my fear is that by only remembering the perpetrator we are giving their memory power over the incident and remembering their legacy over the lives and struggles of the victims.

Now, this is a complex problem because we need to learn about the perpetrators in order to make sense of senseless acts and take steps to prevent such horrors from ever occurring. Yet, I cannot shake the fear that by remembering their name over the names of the victims we are personalizing them in our minds, while the victims just become numbers; the fifty people who lost their lives become just a numbers, a statistic rather than a person. It can be argued that a name is just a name and by remembering it we are not glorifying it, but names, like all other words, have power. They personalize an individual to us; make them real and more concrete in our minds. In the face of these tragedies we cannot let the victims lose their names by extension their identities, becoming just another number used to quantify a tragedy.

We can say that the same problem happens with remembering the Holocaust. We all recognize the name Adolf Hitler because he was the puppet master behind one of the worst genocides. It is important to remember him and his legacy in order to understand the tragedy and prevent something similar from occurring, however, when it comes to the victims, we tend to only remember them as a number- 11 million. After a while, the number loses its meaning to us, and the only way we feel a connection and properly remember the victims is hearing their stories from an individual level. Hearing their names, and remembering them as more that just one of the many is important.

So my call to action in the face of this tragedy is take time for the victims. Even though it hurts, go online and read about the people in Orlando who have been taken from their families. Remember their names, their faces, what they have lost. Now, I don’t expect everyone to go out and memorize the life stories of everyone affected, but maybe by focusing on the victims rather than the shooter we can give the victims and their legacy power over the shooter. The shooter already had the power to take their lives away; we should not take away their individuality by making them into a statistic.