My friends and family would describe me as being a pretty compassionate person. I feel deeply for any person or animal around me, for instance, wanting to take any stray cat off of the streets. I once accidentally ran over a raccoon while driving and sobbed for an hour.
Despite all of this, I still barely feel a thing when I learn about traumatic events happening around the world.
I think it all stems from being born in this generation and the things I have been subjected to in my short 23 years.
For instance, I was only a year old when the Twin Towers were hit by the hijacked planes. Though I was extremely young during the actual event, I grew up in school watching documentaries of people jumping from the towers because it was either that or being burned to death.
That’s not something that a seven-year-old should be exposed to.
I was only twelve when Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I remember watching it on the news in my dentist’s office as it was happening.
My generation is living through the things that are going to be in history books listed as traumatic events.
We’ve had to deal with hundreds of mass shootings, security guards and metal detectors in schools, and being told every semester how to react if there’s a school shooting: Lock the door, go into a corner, don’t make a sound and pray to whatever god you believe in.
Personally, I’m so desensitized to these traumatic events that whenever one happens, I swipe away the news notification without thinking about it for more than a few seconds and I know I’m not the only one.
Margo Solace, who is a student at Kent State, also feels desensitized to these events happening around her.
“When you hear about another shooting, another hate crime, the trans genocide … these are horrific things,” Solace said. “These are things that should be turning points, but they’re not. It’s just another statistic to me.”
Solace thinks that extreme violence has been normalized and that’s why she feels so desensitized.
“When I hear about these things, when I do my research on these events,” Solace said, “it feels like I’m doing research for a school paper, just finding quotes, not actually living in it.”
Our compassion as a generation is limited because we have been overexposed to these violent acts and it no longer affects us the way that it should. Instead, we make jokes and memes about these heinous things as it’s the only way for us to cope.
I’m half glad for this, because I personally don’t have the energy to feel that sort of compassion towards every single victim of every single traumatizing event that I hear about.
It’s exhausting living through these events and as much as I try, I can’t care.
Destiny Torres is an opinion writer. Contact them at [email protected].
