Every morning I wake up, I turn off my alarm clock, struggle to find something suitable to wear to work and stumble down the stairs to the luxurious aroma of coffee that my mother most likely already made (she's the one person I know who is more dependent on caffeine than I am).
I turn the news on and wonder what horrible tragedy has happened in the world since the last one. How many people could have died in the span of hours I was soundly asleep? How close did it happen to home? Who did this? How can we stop them?
When I read articles, I find it difficult to remember what calamity took place when. It's a blur of events, followed by sadness. There are so many victims, we can hardly recall all of their names.
So many places and people have been targeted recently, that it's no longer shocking to turn on the 5 o'clock news and see red and blue flashing lights across the screen.
It has, sadly, become commonplace.
If you ask me (a millennial with an opinion) I'd say things really started to change after 9/11. The word terrorism, something that was never in my vernacular before, became run-of-the-mill. I, like many Millennials, was very young at the time. It's hard to remember life before the world went crazy.
“The attacks of 11 September 2001, known as 9/11, marked a turning point in world history and the beginning of the ‘War on Terror,’” says Our World in Data.
The most recent attacks happened in Orlando (in which 49 people were killed at a night club), Dallas (where five officers were killed, and seven other were injured), Nice (a Bastille day celebration that ended with dozens dead) and Baton Rouge (leaving three officers dead).
According to The New York Times, "In the United States, the death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people –– the equivalent of 27 people shot dead every day of the year."
It's not just a few places where these tragic problems occur, however. The state of the world should be called into question.
What I want to know is why there isn’t an uprising? I think that it’s time that all these hateful acts come to an end. Why aren’t we littering the streets with peaceful protests like the citizens of America did when we needed to stand as one? Like we did when we wanted the Vietnam War to come to an end?
Now more than ever, we need to unite. However we identify, we all identify as human beings. We are all people with emotions and feels, thoughts, wants and dreams. We cannot let the hate divide us.
Whatever we are, wherever we come from, we all bleed red.
