by Phoebe Kolbert

Choir

It is so much easier to ignore the bad news. Especially in the current political climate, where there is so much noise that it’s easy to avoid letting any particular piece of bad news grab you, get a rise out of you.

For me, the Parkland Shooting started out as one of those easily dismissible news items. I was sitting in a waiting room, looking at a particularly hideous collage on the wall. My mother, in a chair beside me, on her phone, gasped.

“What an ugly collage,” I said.

She whispered, “Oh, my god.”

“I know, right? I hope someone’s kid made it, at least.”

“There was a shooting,” she told me. “In Florida.”

I interrupted her, told her I didn’t want to hear about it. Just then a lady entered the waiting room and summoned me to follow, thus ending any consideration of the Florida shooting for the next hour or so. When I exited my appointment, there were two women sitting on the waiting room floor, a mother and her daughter, who was about my age. The young woman was sitting between her mother’s spread legs, mimicking her mother’s position, the back of her head resting on her mother’s chest. I gave them a polite smile, grabbed my coat off a hook, and left. Then promptly broke into laughter.

“What the heck was that?” I asked my mother.

She chuckled softly. “I’m not sure. The mother sat down to stretch and the girl just sat right down, as well.”

In the car on the way home, I checked Twitter, more out of habit than curiosity. As the cliché goes, ignorance is bliss. And the opposite of ignorance is…

•••

I hadn’t had as strong a reaction to the other mass shootings, though the massacre at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado scared me, a lot. It’s the first mass shooting I can remember. We were at the lake when that shooting occurred. I heard the news through the crackly old radio in the place we rent for a week every summer. Only in the past year or so have I been able to go to movies without looking over my shoulder during the film, alert to every little shuffle, the sight of even a semi-sketchy man walking into the theater giving me pause, sometimes compelling me to leave and go sit in the restroom for awhile.

I was 11 when, five months after Aurora, Sandy Hook happened. I remember thinking, Again? I was shocked and terrified at the time, but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. This wasn’t the norm yet, merely an unfortunate repeat.

I watched an episode of Glee that depicted a shooting at their school. One of the cast was stuck in the bathroom when it happened. From TV, I know to crouch on the toilet so intruders can’t see my feet. But that little tidbit doesn’t stop the quick jump in my heart rate when I’m in the bathroom at school and hear yelling in the hallway. What’s happening out there? I wonder. Is something wrong? Are we being attacked?

The Pulse nightclub shooting, in June of 2016, just made me straight-up angry. The accounts of that one were the most explicit I’d heard to date.

But none of those shootings made me cry. Not until this one.

Maybe because it feels so close to home. Teenagers, just trying to get through their day. Maybe it’s the incredible and inspiring reaction of the survivors. I think it’s the latter. I have never been prouder to be a teen, never admired fellow teens so much.

Everyone has been saying this one feels different. I hope it is. But, as the Parkland survivors have been making clear, change can only come if we bring it. And in Portland it can be hard to feel like you’re making a difference. Most of those around you share your views. Because of that, it feels to me like protests often go unheard. I know the whole country, and the rest of this state, doesn’t share my views, but it feels as though anyone who might hear them already agrees.

Yet there is strength in numbers, and you can’t wait around for someone else to do the work for you. Everybody is waiting around. As young people, we do have a unique perspective. We’ve grown up with these problems. We can confidently say the solutions offered so far ain’t working. And we’re not gonna stand for it.

We are teenagers: immortal and restless as hell. Come at us.