Commentary: The kids aren’t alright

By Guest

By Andrew Staiti

I’ve got to admit, the shooting at the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo really threw me for a loop. As someone who grew up in the Columbine era of school shootings becoming the horrifying, depressing norm that they are today, I can say without hesitation that I’ve become desensitized to random acts of violence on a large scale. But the one in Buffalo really hit me. Whether it was the nature of its undertaking being so clear (it is currently being prosecuted as a hate crime), the young age of the gunman, the old age of some of his victims, or just my brain reaching its limit after far too many of these incidents to count, that one shook me to my core.

That one made me stop and write my anger, my sadness, my depression out on paper.

I’ve long turned to writing as a means of self-care and expressing my pain, my jealousy, my anger or bitterness. Many people do the same. But as shooting after shooting happened, I found myself without words to say or write — without feelings to put words to, or to even feel. My shock, anger, sadness, fear and frustration rolled together into a great wad of numbness that surely many in my age group feel. Things aren’t looking up for society, the way they are going, and many of us feel the brunt of it.

No, the kids aren’t alright. And we may never be.

I think if people loved other people as much as we love guns, we might be alright. But that won’t ever be the case in America. I’m not going to get into a Second Amendment discussion here, but I do have a very firm stance on that debate. Is it any wonder that suicide among young people is skyrocketing? It’s not because of violent video games or social media (though both certainly have their respective roles in societal issues as a whole). It’s not because we’re just not “tough,” or too privileged, or whatever the going stereotype is these days. It’s because we don’t have hope. And can you blame us?

When hope ceases to exist, what can one do?

When I was in elementary school in the late 1990s and early 2000s — a mere 20-odd years ago — the biggest things most of us worried about on a day-to-day basis were bullies and bad grades. Now, just a few decades later, elementary school-aged children in America learn the new form of “duck and cover” — active shooter drills. Those were introduced by the time I was in high school, and even as a cocky and self-assured teenager, they scared the bejeezus out of me. I can’t imagine my bevy of young nieces and nephews going through those same drills, but with all the more reality, all the more seriousness, all the more fear. Children in America, learning to fear for their lives at school, at the grocery store, at the movie theater. Is this really the vision our Founding Fathers had? Is this the vision any of us had?

Someday, I hope, we can learn to love again. Someday, I hope, we won’t let anyone and everyone access weapons of mass destruction so easily. Someday, I hope, we’ll be the United States of America, not just a squabbling collection of geographic regions and divided party lines burning bright with the fires of ignorance and prejudice. Someday we’ll get there. But we’re not there yet. And if we ever want things to be alright, we need to get there, and fast.

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