I watched the news on the internet when my daughter was a baby– a deranged man with access to firearms had killed six-year-olds at Sandy Hook, at Christmastime. We didn’t have a television, so I watched it all online in terror. I watched my friends on Facebook simply commenting, “Why?”
We posted sympathetic memes on Facebook, and wrote kitschy poems about the little ones spending Christmas in Heaven.
We moved on.
Corporations started manufacturing bulletproof backpacks.
Somewhere along the line, they started having “lockdowns” and “lockdown drills” in elementary schools. I wasn’t in school anymore, so I didn’t pay them much notice, until it happened to a friend’s daughter. My dear friend had just dropped her eleven-year-old off for school, when she got a robotic call from the office that there had been a shooting. There hadn’t really been a shooting, just the threat of one, but the principal put the whole school on lockdown according to their rehearsed method, and part of that method was a robotic call to all parents. My friend got right back in her car and drove to school, where she saw a SWAT team, a bomb squad, parked ambulances. She found that her daughter had been shoved into a supply closet that was then locked from the outside, and the teacher had gone to the door of the classroom, armed with a chair, to try to defend her charges against a deranged young man with a gun.
Only the principal knew that this was all a precaution, and that there would probably be no deranged young man with a gun. Everyone else in the school thought there was a gunman on the premises. The children in the locked closet were hugging each other, sobbing that they were about to die.
My friend took her daughter home, and went to bed with a panic attack.
We moved on.
The lockdowns haven’t helped very much. The shootings have never stopped. If you threw a dart randomly at a calendar for any month in the last decade, you’d have a difficult time hitting a day when there WASN’T a mass shooting somewhere in America, in a school building or somewhere else.
Last year, on Ash Wednesday, I watched the news coming out of Florida– another school shooting. I saw photo of bystanders crying with blessed ash crosses on smudged on their foreheads. I heard the students talking about how they’d come to expect that such a thing would happen and they weren’t surprised at all. I watched them turn their trauma into activism, and my hope and admiration soared. But so little has been accomplished.
There’s so little we can do.
We don’t control the systems that allow these killings to keep happening. Previous generations set them in place, and by and large they still hold the reins.
Now it’s a year later, and just this weekend two of those students from Florida have committed suicide. And another one of them is on Twitter, sharing the number of the National Suicide hotline with his peers and chatting about what he’s doing for self-care– cooking, surfing, gardening, baths. Because what else is he supposed to do?
This is what it’s like to be a spoiled brat entitled Millennial, or Generation Z.
This is the world we came of age in, the history we know. This is the culture we have been helpless to change.
This is the world in which I’m raising a daughter, who is either one of the youngest members of Generation Z or perhaps the oldest of next generation after that, the one that doesn’t have a name.
We practice our spoiled brat decadent self-care– surfing and facials and watching television, little pastimes to make us feel better– because it’s something we can do to keep our spirits up. It’s a little comfort measure over which we are not completely helpless. It’s harmless, it’s often beneficial, and sometimes it keeps us alive.
Sometimes, of course, it’s not enough.
Speaking of which, if any of my readers are struggling this weekend, the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
(image via Pixabay)
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