Today, I began a routine that I am more used to than I should be. I woke up to 20 alerts from The New York Times, USA Today and CNN. For the second day in a row Orlando had been filled with gun shots and death. I crawled out of bed and turned on the news trying to figure out what happened. I said a prayer for the 20 lives lost, thought of my memories of Downtown Orlando during my two years I lived there and thought, "how and why is this happening again?" Then I went on with my day.
Two hours later I turned on the news to hear my mom's gasp as they announced the death toll rose to 50 and 53 injured, many still critically.
ISIS and homophobia instantly came into the conversation, but all I could think is why and how still. Why does this keep happening? How does this keep happening?
I was born in 1996. Since 1996 there have been countless terror attacks and mass shootings. It's the world I live in, and its extremely different from the world my parents grew up in. Columbine happened a few weeks after my family moved to Highlands Ranch, Colorado, just a few miles away. One of my strongest memories as a child is the morning of 9/11. My mom told me I didn't have to go to school, but the way she made me not interrupt the TV made me realize this wasn't because we had another snow day. She made sure I wore my American flag sweater to school the next day.
I have vivid memories of sitting in my extremely Christian elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky praying for all of the victims of Virginia Tech. As a fifth grader, it was very difficult to understand why a man would do something so horrible.
Since I moved to Annapolis, Maryland in 2008, these things seem to happen every six months or more. Nearly every place I've called home has been the target of an awful deadly attack. Tuscon, Aurora, San Bernardino, and now Orlando. Then add in Boston and Sandy Hook, Paris and Brussels, and countless less televised attacks all over the world. Every time a shooting occurs, we all seem to do the same thing, pray, try to reflect on how it could happen, make a call for change and then forget about it.
My generation has grown up during a time where violence is ever present, especially very high profile shooting and attacks. Yet nothing seems to change. Mental health, gun laws, radicalized Islam and just extremely angry people. I don't have answers to how to stop this, but I don't want to be afraid to go to a movie, to school, to watch my dad run a marathon, to go out to a club, to go to a concert or to take a flight. That's sadly the world we live in.
I'm tired of waking up to hear about another night of violence, I want someone to do something. It's not healthy to live in a world filled with so much violence, but to find a solution we have to figure out how to deal with hate in a better way. After 20 years of being so used to this routine, I want something to change. I want my generation to find the answers to how and why, so that we can stop such horrible acts of violence.
