I like to keep myself up to date with the news. I’ve always believed that it’s important to stay an informed citizen, knowledgeable about what’s going on. From getting daily summaries of news in my email to watching the news in-between my classes, I feel pretty connected with news updates. Lately though, this has started to impact me in a way I didn’t expect it to.

Many people say they hate watching the news because it’s always negative. Nothing happy is ever reported about, because frankly, things that impact the country as a whole tend to be more drastic and sad. Watching the news lately has taken a lot out of me emotionally, especially since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

Everything has been bubbling up to this point now, where I feel helpless.

It pains me to see so many people stepping forward and sharing how they’re traumatized, how they haven’t been able to look at their school the same and just hearing the heartache in their voices. These were children. Every single school shooting that has happened has affected me more and more, and this one was just the tipping point.

Children are supposed to go to school to learn, not to live in fear that at any point someone could enter their classroom and start shooting. They should be concerned with learning a difficult math concept, and not about if their school will be the next school in the major news headlines.

News coverage of the Parkland shooting has not stopped since it happened, and understandably so. The students are not sitting by quietly since the mass shooting that they had to live through. They are demanding change, so that other children don’t have to live through what they had to go through. So that history doesn’t repeat itself.

I am in full support of this. This will not be yet another shooting that gets swept under the rug. Enough with the thoughts and prayers- it’s time for action to be made from those in political power. How many more lives must be abruptly ended before someone steps up and does something? It should not be the norm for shootings to happen.

I shouldn’t be desensitized to all of this.

No child should be desensitized to school shootings.

I hope, with everything in my heart, that something changes. I can’t even begin to imagine what the students of Parkland have had to go through over this past week. Or any student who has lived through a school shooting. No child should have to go through an experience as traumatic as that, and it breaks my heart to know that so many lives will never be the same.