“How can you read that?” one of my friends asked me the other day, as I was reading about the recent Florida school shooting. “I could never read that. Isn’t it depressing? Why do you put yourself through that?”
Yes. Yes, it’s depressing. For every new year comes new school shootings. But honestly, feeling that sadness, that grief, is important. I’m not saying we should bear the weight of every death in the world on our shoulders, but if we don’t let ourselves get even slightly upset when another school gets shot up, how is anything ever going to change?
School shootings have become normalized. With every shooting that occurs, it becomes harder to remember the names of all the schools, much less the names of the victims. It becomes harder to remember that the victims were people. Intellectually, of course, we know they were people — but do we remember that emotionally?
After a while, after every school shooting, we begin to forget. We forget the distraught parents and friends of the victims. We forget how bad we felt for them when we saw the tear-stricken faces in the photos. We forget the pleas of the survivors to do something, to stop these tragedies. We forget because we don’t want to remember how truly terrible the world can be.
And maybe we could all live happier lives if we chose to ignore sad news, chose to not let it affect us. The old adage, “Ignorance is bliss,” might be true. Ignorance, however, is only bliss until you get a rude awakening. It’s easy enough to ignore it now when it can seem so distant, but what happens when it happens again — this time, in your friend’s or your cousin’s school?
When we forget how tragic and saddening school shootings are, we forget that for every victim that dies we lose something as a society. Not only do we lose a valuable life, a potential doctor or artist or parent or good Samaritan, but we lose a little bit of ourselves. We start to lose our ability to feel sad for a death that seems far away from us, and the news of every new school shooting affects us just a little less.
When school shootings affect us less, we become less motivated to stop them. We still agree that they are bad, but for a lot of people, issues don’t become urgent until they’re personal. Then, suddenly, we need to act right away. We need to do something. When school shootings don’t feel personal, don’t feel close to us, they don’t feel as urgent. Sure, we can all agree that we don’t want more people to die. But if we — and here when I say “we,” I mean our legislators — truly felt that this issue was as pressing and critical as we say we know it is, we would actually be doing something about it.
So yes, reading about and watching news coverage of school shootings is depressing, but necessarily so. We need to feel upset when events like the Florida shooting happen. We need to read the victims’ names, and their friends’ and relatives’ statements. If anything is ever going to change, we need to remember just how human — how like us or our friends and family — the victims were.
