Singer Christina Grimmie, 22, shot and killed while signing autographs after her concert in Orlando, Fl.
Mass shooting leaves 49 dead and over 50 injured at Orlando gay nightclub, Pulse.
Brock Turner convicted of sexual assault of an unconscious woman on Stanford University's campus.
These headlines as well as countless articles and tribute posts were all over the news and my social media accounts in the span of a week. As an American citizen, I have never felt so saddened and lost.
I was never someone who really watched the news or read newspapers. It's not that I wasn't interested in the different things that were occurring nationwide, I just always felt disheartened, helpless, and oftentimes fearful when I uncovered the horrors of the world around me. I wasn't fearful for myself, but rather of what our country and the people within it had become.
Murder, theft, kidnappings, sexual assaults, human trafficking, mass shootings, suicides; being up to date with the world became too much to bare, as the rate of these horrific crimes kept escalating as I got older. I found myself wanting to know less and less, to actively disengage with any and all forms of breaking news. I would constantly get criticized by friends and family when current events came up in conversation and I knew none of the crucial details they were discussing.
"You have to know what's going on around you." "You can't live your life in a bubble." But this was quite the contrary: whatever "bubble" I had was completely obliterated, taking my very limited adolescent bliss in its demise. And truthfully, it's very hard to not know what is going on around you if you have any form of social media, which I do. My newsfeed turned from pictures of people's vacations and pets into hundreds of morbid articles and rainbow filtered profile pictures.
It's hard for me to understand a world in which these events happen on a daily basis, that there could be so much hate and anger. Whenever I see these news stories I think to myself, "What else could go wrong?" only to be quickly answered with five worse occurrences, and I know it is only going to get worse from here. As someone who truly believes that everything happens for a reason and tries to see the good in everything, I feel like I am drowning in lost hope. I know it is said that things get worse before they get better, but I'm not sure if that is the case anymore.
I have been fortunate enough to not have experienced these things personally, but it shouldn't be my fortune to have. I shouldn't know people who were held at gunpoint or have friends who were sexually assaulted and raped.
I should not know people who call themselves victims or survivors.
Who are we? Who have we become? We project the image of a global superpower, that everything is perfect and as it should be in this country, when truthfully we have become worse than most. We declare freedom for all, but this is a false claim.
I do not feel free; I feel trapped in the violence and chaos that has suffocated this country.
