Log with Liv

One of my favorite college application essays I wrote this past fall centered around if I believed society was progressing or headed toward destruction. I answered that society must be progressing. We have to be, right? What would it mean for humanity to assert that we are no longer moving forward? To say that we have become so stuck in our own greed and blind division that we have rerouted our projection altogether, into a direction much more sinister? 

My mouth always forms the word “evolving” in response to the question, but before the sound of progress can quite make it out, a doubt deep within my stomach grows from the world’s seemingly never-ending supply of tragedy and injustice. 

I do not know what the answer is. I know life is full of joy, love, and wonderful people, but I also know that every time I read a new headline, I cannot help but wonder at what point the loss and grief begin to outweigh the good. 

I cannot help but feel like we are constantly bombarded by tragedy. In my college application essay, I decided that our world was headed towards a progress that I was determined to take part in. Now, when I no longer have to worry about portraying myself as an attractive college candidate, I waver on this stance. I find it more and more difficult to associate the news I read each morning with progress. 

This is not a post about my essay, though. It is a post about a loss of faith in the world around me. It is about backward movement, destruction, and dead children. It is about unidentifiable 10-year-old bodies riddled with bullets. It is about guns and lawmakers, a generation of ALICE and violence.

A few years ago I spoke at a March For Our Lives rally in front of congressmen and teenagers scared of getting shot in their schools. I spoke about the fear that our generation holds within ourselves. I spoke about the worries that haunt our subconscious, the images of dead friends that exist in the back of our minds. I spoke about escape routes planned in classrooms, AR-15s and the nation’s youth pitted against each other by lawmakers. I finished by promising that our generation had found our voice, that we were ready to fight back, that we would finally be heard. All this was said with the Parkland shooting as a recent memory. I was sure that something had finally shifted. I was confident that national attention to such a massive tragedy would manifest itself as a renewed vigor in legislatures to address the massive gun issue facing our nation.

Years later, I regret my confidence. Kids are still dying. We still go to school in fear of guns. I see no progress. 

I used to talk about gun violence with anyone I could. I participated in my fair share of arguments with anonymous accounts on social media. I spoke with friends about what had been done, what could be done. Now though, I am tired. I have nothing left to say. Kids are dying and I learn in fear, and nothing I have said seems to have made any difference. I want so badly to believe in progress, but I am exhausted and angry. An entire generation has yelled their outrage into the face of our nation’s government and nothing has come from it. This year already, it seems as if there have been more shootings than ever. The recent events in Tennessee’s legislature, too, immediately come to mind as evidence of a disregard and silencing of the nation’s youth and our interests.

I don’t know how much more we must scream. It is certainly beginning to look like loud protests will always fail when falling on deliberately deaf ears, stuffed by the cotton of profit and “freedom.” 

Our generation has always been taught to fight for what we believe in. We have been told over and over again that we will be the ones to rectify this world’s problems. We have shouldered the burden of our own survival. We have been taught to recognize injustice, the plentiful problems facing our world, and taught to fight back, to speak out. We were taught that the world wants to know what we have to say, that lawmakers cared, that those around us would respond to our passion, our desperation. We said “never again,” and it happened again, and again, and again. Now, my conclusion tends to be that no one does care. Or, at least, not enough people. Not the right people. 

Progress seems impossible right now and destruction imminent, and yet, I find myself still inclined to finish this post with a call to speak out, to continue fighting. Maybe that propensity to fight is enough to ensure that progress has not entirely been lost, though. Either way, kids are still dying and we still live in fear. If we cannot stand up for our lives, if we cannot take every possible step to promote our survival, then destruction is assured. 

Progress is no dead students. Despite the infuriating lack of movement toward this (ideally universal) goal, I absolutely refuse to give in. Something must be done, and, voices hoarse and faith battered, I fear it is up to us to save our own lives. 

Something must change, and for that, I am sending thoughts and prayers…Thoughts and prayers are the most effective form of action, right? They stop bullets, right? They revive dead, bloodied children, right? Right?