In 1999, the now infamous shooting at Columbine High School left twelve students and one teacher dead; I was four years old. Since then, my generation has developed a long-standing relationship with mass shootings. Alongside many millennials, I do not remember a school building without security guards, metal detectors or active shooter drills. Â Since elementary school, after-school specials involving guns in schools and unfounded threats of school shootings were commonplace. Mass shootings and gun violence have defined our realities, shaped our worldviews, and dulled the effects of tragedy, so much so that when I noticed a news alert about the Parkland shooting, I was heartbroken, but no longer surprised.
Social media platforms have cultivated a desire for instant gratification or instant rejection. We scroll up, swipe right or left, and move on to the next thing. Sadly, this short attention span encouraged by social media also applies to our view of tragedies such as the recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It seems we are desensitized to gun violence, and so oversaturated with the negative that we pay little attention. Unless tragedies have a direct effect on us, it almost as if they have no effect at all.
In reality, I have a small connection to quite a few mass shootings: I recently learned my friend’s father was working a mile away from the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California when on December of 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 were injured in a mass shooting. Following the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, I noted friends of friends sharing eulogies for a young man I never had the privilege to meet. Later in October of 2017, three people were killed and two were injured in a shooting at a Maryland business while my roommate’s mother was in an office across town. I am increasingly aware that I am not as far removed from tragedy as I thought, and it has left me very conscious of the violence we have accepted as normal. Â
As young adults, we often see our form of activism on social media as the same as the activism of the young people rallying for the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War protests. Yet, unlike the movements before, our phones are our only recourse. Our online outrage floods the endless black hole that is the internet, and “social media warriors” continue to add to the abundant opinion pieces that fill our feeds. A well placed retweet fulfills our democratic duty to protest. Meanwhile, we fail to mobilize offline, and hashtags and online movements die as quickly as they are created. This lack of substantial impact and little desire to debate offline has left my generation fatigued and frustrated. We find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle: tragedy occurs, some call for action, others reverence. It all feels incredibly redundant.
Yet the teenagers of Stoneman Douglas are hopeful. Today’s activists are no longer twenty-somethings on Twitter, but seventeen-year-olds with megaphones. Surviving students are not only taking to social media, but speaking up, organizing events and marches, and calling for leaders to make changes to US gun laws. Despite your political views, it’s difficult to deny the impact. CNN hosted a town hall, major companies are cutting ties with the NRA, and gun control measures are once again being floated around Capitol Hill. This time, it seems,  the new generation is refusing to let tragedies like Parkland become their reality. And, this time, it seems, we are listening.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote the bulk of this article three months ago. Except, instead of Parkland, it was Sutherland Springs. Upset and searching for an outlet, I threw my thoughts on a page and saved the file on my desktop. I tucked it away, thinking the text itself and the context surrounding it would never change. And in fact, a lot has remained the same. We are still fighting a battle online instead of off, we are still tired, and we are still hearing the same arguments over and over again. It will take several weeks, even months, to see if the Parkland survivors’ efforts will prompt long-term change . Regardless of the outcome, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been able to do something twenty-something millennials have yet to accomplish: they have kept our attention.
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