Eleven years ago today, two teenage boys opened fire on a high school in Littleton, Colo.
Eleven years ago tomorrow, our generation was afraid to go to school.
The tragedy that happened at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 changed the way we grew up. It changed our parents. It changed the way we thought about guns, about security, about our society.
And it forever altered how we thought about school. The massacre was in a place meant to encourage learning, to grow friendships — a place that was supposed to be safe.
And after April 20, 1999, school wasn’t a haven anymore. It became a place where we did intruder drills and locker checks. Where we knew there was a possibility that one of our classmates could easily bring a weapon to school — and where we knew there was very little we could do about it. And many of us weren’t even in high school yet.
Columbine scared us — and it scarred us.
But it was not the only thing that did.
Before many of us hit our teen years, we saw planes hit the Twin Towers. We knew Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. In high school we watched Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and we were petrified by what happened at Virginia Tech, yet another massacre in a school we were at or headed for — college.
But this is not all that defines us.
We are the children born into the Internet, cell phones and the Gameboy. We are accused of being lazy, having a sense of entitlement and unprecedented narcissism.
We have been labeled Generation Y, Millennials and Generation Me.
And still, we have been shaped by tragedy — advancements and successes too, but tragedy without a doubt.
Our growing-up years were marred by violent events — but what has it done to us?
Are we more paranoid? Have we become desensitized to death and carnage? Are we more aware of our mortality?
Yes, these are our reactions. But along with paranoia comes awareness — we have heightened sensitivity, and our mortality shows us how much we can do with our lives.
The events that marked our childhood and adolescence have made us a socially conscious generation, and research has shown it. We volunteer in impressive numbers. We care about education, about the environment, about people.
Yes, self-indulgence and egoism are part of our traits — we spend hours on Facebook and Twitter telling the world our most insignificant thoughts. But even then, we are learning about people across the globe. No matter how superficial our click in support of a Facebook cause is, we are at least aware of the many problems in our world. We can’t each help everyone, but we can help someone — and a lot of us do, just look at the outpouring in the Haiti earthquake aftermath.
We are young, yes, but we’ve seen tragedy in our lives, and we’ve seen it enough to know that we have to do something to change it, for now and for future generations.
Time and again, these events have rocked us to the very foundations of our core, but we are still here. We will learn from the mistakes of the few who have scared us, we will change our world today and we will keep the next generations from harm.
