I doze off in class. Normally my mind drifts off into thinking about what I am doing after school, what my weekend plans are, etc.. But then the stories and the headlines popped into my mind. I was evaluating all the my exits around the classroom, how much time it would take me to get out of my seat and run, and imagining what that horrible fear of being at a school shooting must feel like.
Being a student in high school or college already is filled with its own distractions. But when a student has to contemplate how safe they feel in their own classroom, that is a problem.
Schools try their best to construct “safe learning environments” so students can feel comfortable in their school setting.
However, in a time when school shootings appear almost on a quarterly basis, how can one even begin to feel 100% safe at their own school?
Just more than a week or so, 17 students we killed at a Florida high school.. From remembering the exact place and time it was when I heard about the Sandy Hook shooting, to know seeing nation barely flinch at the headline at “At least 17 dead in Florida school shooting,” the development of a society that grown to normalize mass shootings is a concerning establishment.
Nikolas Cruz will be found guilty of taking the life of 17 people. However, the masses won’t label him a terrorist or white supremacists; all the hate he stood for and what he represents about vocal extremism rising in this nation will be swept under the rug of societal ignorance.
One may say that Cruz is not a terrorist because a terrorist is defined as “the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror, or fear, to achieve a financial, political, religious or ideological aim.” Cruz’s background says otherwise. His online history consists of messages of white supremacy and hate towards minorities, religious, and social groups. His attack on Stoneman Douglas high school is a display of intimidation and evocation of fear from a person full of hate.
Like many past school shooters, Cruz is a white male. Radical ideology fuels much of the hate that is found in these shootings that they use to induce fear, but they will not be labeled as terrorists.
The next few months will be filled with speculation that rarely amounts to anything. People will talk about America’s gun issue and the process of obtaining and owning a gun that is made up of logic that could only have any applicability to years before the late 19th century.
They will about the stigma of mental health and the underlying issues that lead up to the shooting. The shooter will be mentioned to have a “troubled childhood” and displayed signs that everyone around him missed.
While all this chatter takes place, the students will have to still go to school every day wondering how safe they are, and if the elected government officials that are there to ensure their well being, will go the extra step to make a difference and ensure their safety.
But from what history shows, not much will change.
There needs to be an attribution to the shooting to the radical white supremacist ideology that fuels the terrorist that is Nikolas Cruz. There must be acknowledgment to the fact that the very same hate and sentiment that Cruz displayed in his online history much inlines with the same white supremacists' vocality over the past years that has gone too long unchecked by our government.
The problem underlying many of these school shootings is much more dynamic than the label of a gun or mental health problem. There must be a culture change within society that prohibits the normalization of radicality and gun violence. This starts with everyone though, across all party lines and ideologies.
They must vocalize that enough is enough and that if nothing is done, nothing will get better.
