My late 40s to early 50s boss just asked what’s wrong with 18-25 year olds these days

And as a 21 year old all I could think was

The world has been on fire since we were born and we’ve been told the adults are putting it out and now we’re old enough to realize they’ve been pouring kerosene on the flames instead of water.

Before my first birthday, 9/11 happened and the world wouldn’t let us forget it. When I was 6 years old, on September 11th, my teacher sat us down in front of a tv and showed us footage of 9/11 and then told us we weren’t allowed to cry. She said that it was real and those were real people jumping from the building because jumping was a faster death than burning.

When I was 7 years old, the economy collapsed and my family went from lower middle class to poverty, we went from healthy home cooked meals every night to mac and cheese and beans for weeks in a row. We started skipping holidays because mom and dad couldn’t keep the lights on and buy us new toys. We started wearing clothes and shoes until they fell apart.

When I was 11 years old, Sandy Hook was attacked by a grown man with a gun and 26 children and teachers were brutally murdered. My teachers never looked at us the same and I haven’t felt safe in a school since. After that, once a month we would have active shooter drills and we were taught to fight and cause as much damage as possible if an armed man entered our classroom because it gave other classes a few extra seconds to escape, it gave our siblings a few extra breaths of safety. We were taught to cover ourselves in other students blood and play dead if we weren’t hit, we were taught that we weren’t safe and we wouldn’t be safe as long as we were in school.

When I was 15 years old, my high school art teacher locked us in the classroom and told us if we heard gunshots we should line the desks up lengthwise so that they reached the other wall because that would be harder to break through than a barricade. She told us that she knew about the threats and she wouldn’t judge any of us that wanted to leave. She told us to get our siblings and stay in the buildings as long as possible, to duck in between the cars so we couldn’t be seen until we got to ours. She told us about the trail behind the auto shop that was lined with trees and led off campus. I got my brother and his friends and we left, we spent the day sitting on the floor in my living room waiting for a phone call that the people we left behind were dying.

Two weeks later, one of my friends dragged me out of a football game and forced me to go home with him. He grabbed my brothers and my best friend and forced the six of us into a two seater car before he would tell us anything. His mom worked for the school board and had told him the police found an active bomb under the bleachers in the student section, and they weren’t informing anyone because they didn’t want to incite panic.

When I was 16 years old, ISIS set off a bomb at a pop concert in Britain and killed 22 people, injuring at least 100 more. The next day at school, our teachers went over how to stay safe if we ever experienced something like that. They told us the most important thing to remember was to not remove any shrapnel because it could be keeping us from bleeding out, they said it was more important to get yourself out safely before you worried about anyone else.

When I was 18 years old, my teachers stopped teaching and put the news up on the projector and we watched as the Notre-Dame burned. The boy I had sat next to since second grade spent the entire day trying to call his sister who was studying abroad in Paris, I watched this kid I had never even seen frown fall apart in English because she wouldn’t pick up the phone. We didn’t know it at the time, but she was okay.

Six months later, my history teacher put the news on the projector again for another fire. This time, we watched as an entire continent burned for three months. We watched their sky turned orange from the smoke and their wildlife drowned in pools because they were trying to escape the heat.

When I was 19 years old, the whole world shut down because of a global pandemic. I didn’t meet a single new person for eight months, despite the fact that I had just moved across the country. I watched as people didn’t wear masks and spread it to everyone around them, I was so scared when I went back to my room every night because my roommate was immunocompromised and I was terrified I would give her Covid and kill her.

Just two months later, I watched a video of a black man being murdered by police officers. I watched the world around me explode after George Floyd’s death, people destroying businesses and police stations. I watched some of my friends realize police officers didn’t exist to keep them safe, they existed to keep the people in power in power. I learned that some of the people I had grown up with would rather watch a black man die than admit that maybe, maybe, the system was broken.

When I was 20 years old, I went to the mall with a friend to buy a birthday present and I was pulled to the ground by a twelve-year-old girl after gunshots went off in the mall. I held this child’s hands as she cried for two hours until we were evacuated by police, and then I waited with her outside and helped her look for her mom. I gave her my phone to call her mom and I watched as she called the number over and over and never got a reply. I waited with her until a police officer took her to the station to try to find out more information about the girl’s mom, I hugged this girl I had never seen before and I wished her the best. I never found out what happened to her or her mom, it keeps me up at night sometimes worrying that this little girl was orphaned.

When I was 21 years old, I started working at a daycare and exactly a week later, Uvalde happened and I found myself crying because my students are the same age those kids were. When they came in after school the next day, one of them had asked me if I had heard about Uvalde and I told her I had, I asked her if she was scared of going to school because of it. Her reply broke my heart. “We practice for it every week so that when it happens to us, we know what to do. I’m just worried that the shooter is going to start in my baby sister’s classroom and not mine.” I listened as other students with younger siblings agreed with her, one of them saying “I would take fifty bullets, if I had to to keep my little brother safe.”

Early this year, I watched Russia launched bombs into Ukraine, blowing up churches and schools and hospitals and apartment buildings. I watched as the estimated death count rose from the hundreds to the thousands to the tens of thousands. I watched men send their wives and children to bordering countries for refuge while they stayed behind to fight, knowing they would probably never see each other again.

Just four months ago, I watched as my right to medical privacy got taken away. I watched my old roommate fall apart because she was denied the right to have her dead fetus removed from her body for almost two days, I worried every time I looked away from her that the next time I saw her would be in a casket. I watched as the women around me realized the military-grade weapons that had torn children in classrooms apart were protected by the government but our bodies weren’t.

There is nothing “wrong” with my generation, we’ve experienced all these things as children and were expected to respond with patriotism for a country that continuously sacrificed their children for the “right” to military-grade weapons, that took away my freedom of choice. We are tired, we were told the world was a wonderful place then shown, at every step, how the world was a place of destruction and pain. And we are angry. We are angry because no one but us seems to be trying to fix anything. And we are scared. We are scared because our children, our nieces and nephews, our cousins and our friends children are growing up in a world that won’t protect them.

October 7, 2022

The Uvalde, Texas, school district -- still facing withering criticism over its police department's failings both during the May 24 elementary school massacre and since -- announced the suspension of the entire district police force on Friday.

The Cops said "Fuck them kids."

One of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting was 10 year old Amerie Jo Garza, who was a Girl Scout Junior.

She was posthumously awarded the Bronze Cross, which is awarded for saving or attempting to save life at the risk of the Girl Scout’s own life. Amerie risked and lost her life after calling for help attempting to save the lives of her classmates and teachers.

Personally, as a Girl Scout leader of girls ages 10-12 , it breaks my heart to think of any of my girls in a similar situation. Please let’s take action on common sense gun reform!

One of the police at Uvalde’s wife was one of the teachers who were killed in the school shooting. I think it was at least 30 minutes in when he got the text from his wife saying “I’m dying” when he decided to try to do something, but he was stopped by the other police. (I didn’t watch the full thing. I’m just going off of what others are saying right now. I might edit this if I find out the exact time stamp.)

The cop was detained, had his gun taken away from him and escorted out of the building. From trying to save his wife from a shooter.

Also he had a stupid Punisher logo with the American flag on it, which is both ironic and also kind of telling.

If anyone is comparing what happened in Uvalde to the murder of Emmett Till you need to knock it off. Immediately. No one has to be convinced that what happened in Uvaldes was an evil act. Those children and the teachers that lost their lives for them do not have to have their humanity defended like Till did when he was murdered. Let Emmett and those children rest.

I’ve taught primary. I’ve taught kids as young as six. I would’ve laid down my life for any one of them without question.

I cannot fathom going in to teach everyday knowing that you might have to though.

Rest in peace little ones.

Rest in power teachers. I know you did all you could.

Beto O'Rourke at Governor Abbott's press conference: "The spirit grows strong in me, and I will no longer endure it."

(William Shakespeare, As You Like it)

Unrelated (maybe) but relevant:

Chief of ISD was just elected to City Council.

“Only now, a more reliable chronology is emerging through official statements, 911 logs, social media posts, and interviews with survivors and witnesses. The revelations tell a story of institutional failure at the expense of unprotected children. Here in Uvalde, there is little expectation that correcting the record will lead to any real policy change, especially with hyperpartisan midterm elections looming.”

...

“By at least 12.15 p.m. McCraw said, “as many as 19″ law enforcement officers had converged on a school hallway, including Border Patrol tactical team members who arrived with shields.  “There was plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done,” McCraw said. But the incident commander believed more equipment and people were needed for a “breach,” McCraw said, and he added that there was a sense that law enforcement “had time” and saw “no kids at risk.””

...

“When he made it to the scene, Reyz said, more than a dozen parents already were huddled near the entrance of the school, demanding that officers do more to intervene. On the east side of the building, he said, another group of parents were trying to push through a fence to get inside the school, but were being repelled by police.”

I don’t think I’ll word this correctly, but these are my thoughts on school shootings in the good ol’ US of A.

First of all, I’ll establish my perspective. I am a recent high school graduate with a sibling who has just entered high school. My mother teaches at an elementary school. My father works in the government, but not in an area relevant to this discussion. I do not have much education in the US government besides the basic core curriculum, and even that has been disrupted by some factors I do not find relevant.

This discussion is not about Uvalde specifically, but the trend of school shootings overall. I have not had an opportunity to look into Uvalde beyond what the grapevine’s fed to me, but I fully intend to do more research in the future, based on some accusations I’ve heard.

My school has, from what I’ve seen, at most two police officers on school grounds to cover almost 20 entrances to the school building, which seems far from adequate to prevent an active shooter from harming a significant percentage of the school population (of course, any death from a school shooting is very significant, I mean larger numbers). My school also performs active shooter drills about once a semester (or so) and treats them largely the same as fire and tornado drills. The PA system tells us it’s happening, we sigh and sit in a corner of the room, then we get up. No further discussion of school shootings. It’s not like we don’t have the opportunity for it, there are whole class period we set aside for schoolwide lessons on stuff like mental health every day. But instead we treat active shooters like fires and tornadoes - almost unavoidable natural disasters. Which active shooters aren’t, let me be clear. I’m not sure if this is a national pattern, or even a statewide pattern, but the most directly we address school shootings is the occasional walkout. Among students and faculty, the drills are treated as little more than a nuisance.

This treatment of school shootings (not including walkouts) does not address ways to prevent school shootings from happening in the first place, instead telling us how to react to a school shooting, which is to sit in a dark room hoping the shooter doesn’t know that’s what we’re doing. This treatment prevents the meaningful discussion of the reasons behind a shooter’s actions and how they arrive at the decision to kill students. It does not tell us what to look for in our classmates for possible school shooters, it does not tell us how to treat our classmates to prevent school shooters from developing. It does not stop school shootings from happening, it arguably helps shooters who were once students at my school. This informs potential student school shooters that the school does not consider them worth its time to help or to prevent them from attacking their classmates. It tells them their school ultimately doesn’t care about what damage the student has endured until that student attempts to turn the damage outwards. 

Moving on to the public response to school shootings and policies relating to them. It’s absolutely and unconditionally horrifying to me how quickly various groups around the US will trend from grief over the losses to manipulation of said losses to support their ideals. Usually it takes barely a week for headlines and social media responses to go from “oh my god children were shot to death” to “yeah, kids died, and here’s what that means for your political arguments” and that happens around a week and a half after the shooting itself. Not two weeks after their classmates and faculty were brutally massacred, the survivors have to face the rest of the country dragging the event from political extreme to political extreme, while almost nobody outside of the county it happened in appears to care about the real effects on the remaining students besides proving a point. It’s abhorrent to treat the deaths of many children as little more than a political tool, an opportunity to stick it to the other wing that just happened to fall into your campaign. 

When a policy change is considered, which is rare, it takes almost no time for 2nd amendment supporters to rain down in droves, condemning anyone who suggests the shooter shouldn’t have had access to guns as a traitor. No matter how many school shootings happen, no matter how many children die, they decry any bill that so much as mentions firearm restriction. They act as if the Founding Fathers had assault weapons in mind when crafting the Bill of Rights, as if firearms designed to efficiently kill that have a crime in their names are totally fine. 

What frustrate me about this unyielding adherence to a 300 year old law isn’t legal obedience, but how welcoming it must be to potential school shooters. When these people refuse to restrict gun purchases, they directly allow school shooters to access the resources they need to kill people. More than that, they give potential school shooter a community they will feel safe in, one that will support them right up until they actually shoot a kid, a community that will inadvertently provide a school shooter with everything they need to succeed. 

And I know from experience that someone will bring up that one guy who drove a truck through a crowd in France as if that man couldn’t have killed dozens more people if he had an assault weapon. They’ll say that people will find other ways to kill people, completely ignoring that it’s harder to effectively kill someone with a truck or something than it is to kill someone with a weapon designed to do that.

I’m sorry if this is off-brand, I just had to get it out. I felt like I was just talking to a brick wall when discussing this with my mom. 

The full 77 minute school security video of Uvalde Elementary school has been found. I don’t know if the full thing has been leaked but there is an edited down version.

Here’s a link to it if you really want to see it. It’s disturbing and infuriating.

It’s been edited down to 4 minutes but by the sounds of it the other 73 minutes wouldn’t have mattered. It also describes what’s being captured from outside and how much time has passed between the clips. It censors the children’s screams. It also censors a child who was in the hallway. He looks around the corner and runs away. The shooter doesn’t seem to have noticed him in the footage.

It does clearly show the shooter walking in the school, and he doesn’t enter the first classroom he targets. It also includes a 911 call from a teacher. She describes what the kids first instincts seem to be and it’s pretty upsetting.

There’s more perspectives that’s not being shown, obviously. There are already videos of the parent’s perspective but to my knowledge there’s nothing showing what the cops are doing outside otherwise.

The shooter from the Uvalde massacre was an 18-year-old gunman who legally bought a gun after his birthday. He was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent after the incident.

Is Elon Musk right to criticize media for giving attention to shooter in TX shooting?

Do you agree or not? Discuss at the link

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