“There are plenty of places in the world where a kid dying is pretty common. But we can’t deal with it because a dead child is the greatest failure of a culture that believes it’s reversed the order of nature.” — Six Feet Under (2001)
Dear adults, do you remember the terror you felt that fateful day of September 11? When you watched the Twin Towers collapse, and worried that maybe your building would be next? What impact did that single day have on your life?
I was not born on that day, so I only have the experience of what people tell me. But if I can understand your fear of having a plane crash into your workplace, maybe you can understand my daily fear of being shot in my biology class.
You dismiss my feelings and ignore the daily terror I experience. Yet we went to war to make you feel secure. You allowed trillions to be taken away from education and infrastructure to pay for bombs. Did all those sacrifices you made to my future, and the destruction you enabled, ever bring you the safety you craved?
Perhaps you don’t care about my safety, or the daily trauma and panic my generation endures going to school because of too many guns and too little mental health support. Perhaps you turn a blind eye because you are unwilling to admit your role in the terror that grips our young lives.
Twenty-four years after 9/11, the words “never forget” are still recited with reverence. Ground Zero in New York is hallowed ground. But the schools where children are murdered — Uvalde, Parkland, and Sandy Hook – fade from your memory before the blood dries.
There are no national days of mourning for the third graders who die hiding in closets. No legacy-building speeches for the teenage girl shot through the stomach while taking a math test. No flags lowered, no moments of silence. Just crime tape, press conferences, and hollow social media statements saying “thoughts and prayers” that mean less each time they’re recycled.
We were trained to survive a shooting before we were old enough to read cursive. We learned to lock doors, pile chairs against windows, and hide in bathrooms if the hallway screams began. Some of us rehearsed bleeding control drills with tourniquets made for war zones. And we did it all while being told school was the safest place we could be.
I used to imagine I would be the one to disarm the gunman. Now I just imagine how fast I can run. In the early years, the horror of a school shooting would ripple outward. Long headlines, special reports, and a presidential visit. Today, it’s barely a headline unless the death toll crosses a threshold. If five kids die, maybe it trends. If it’s only one, it’s just “local coverage.”
Then COVID changed everything. It ripped children from classrooms and tossed them into isolation and screen time and uncertainty. It severed peer bonds, broke school routines, and unleashed a wave of anxiety and depression that schools were never equipped to handle. When we came back, we weren’t the same. Neither were the schools.
The doors locked earlier. The glass was bulletproof. The cops were already inside. But none of it changed the fact that kids were angrier, sadder, and in some cases, more violent. There’s a new kind of numbness that’s settled in. The fire drills still happen. The active shooter drills still happen. The shootings still happen. But the outrage is gone.
School violence has evolved. Not necessarily in body count, but in familiarity. In 2018, we asked how this could happen. In 2025, we ask where it happened this time. It’s not shocking anymore. It’s geography.
And while school shootings remain episodic, they’ve become the central trauma of an entire generation. We don’t need to experience it firsthand to feel its weight. We see it in hallway whispers, in panicked texts when a school goes on lockdown three towns over. We hear it in the silence that follows a loud bang in the cafeteria. Every backpack left unattended becomes suspicious. Every classmate could be a threat.
And still, the adults talk in circles. Some blame video games. Some blame mental illness. Some call for armed teachers. Others say there’s nothing to be done. But we’re the ones bleeding out while they bicker. We’re the ones memorizing sounds, like the difference between a firecracker and a 9mm round.
The same lawmakers who once declared they would stop at nothing to defend America after 9/11 now shrug when American children are killed in their classrooms. They vote to expand gun rights, not protect human life. They restrict books with more passion than they restrict bullets.
I’ve watched students try to adapt, to hold onto hope. They organize walkouts. They write speeches. They scream into microphones at rallies and city councils. But over time, even the loudest voices grow hoarse. The energy fades. Some burn out. Some tune out. And some just leave because they survive long enough to graduate. They’ve aged out of the system that tried to kill them.
We tell children they are the future, but we build them a country where dying in a classroom is considered an acceptable risk. Where bulletproof backpacks are marketed with bright colors and cartoon characters. Where teachers are trained to use trauma kits, but are not given the salary to stay in the profession. Where the cycle of horror is so routine that students now instinctively reach for their phones before the lockdown begins. Not to call for help, but to say goodbye.
There’s a collective erosion happening. We grow up fast, but we don’t grow up whole. Our school years are carved by threat assessments and morning announcements about “increased security presence.” We celebrate prom and graduation with the same classmates we once huddled beside in the dark. Trauma is not a chapter in our lives. It’s the binding.
You had your defining moment with 9/11. You mourned, you raged, you reorganized your politics and identities around that trauma. It shaped your patriotism, your distrust, your foreign policy, your belief in sacrifice. But when we try to name our defining moment, we’re told it’s not the same. That it’s different because it doesn’t have a single date. That it’s not terrorism because it’s domestic. That it’s not war because there’s no battlefield.
You’re wrong.
The battlefield is the hallway between English and gym. The enemy is a neighbor’s son with access to a semi-automatic. The war is the one you let happen, over and over, while telling us that “nothing can be done.”
We are the civilian casualties of your inaction. And the only memorial we get is the faint echo of a newscaster’s voice listing the names of the dead, before cutting to weather.
What would it take for you to care? If a plane hit a school, would that finally be enough? If a foreign power claimed responsibility for a kindergarten massacre, would you still call it a mental health issue? Or would you finally act with the urgency we begged for, if it were your own children in those classrooms?
The truth is, this country has long decided what it values more than our lives. Guns are sacred. Profit is sacred. Unborn lives are sacred. Denial is sacred. Living children are not.
You protect statues more fiercely than students. You regulate drag shows more strictly than firearms. And every time you change the channel, scroll past a headline, or sigh and say “not again,” you become complicit.
This is not a call for unity. We don’t need your unity. We need your surrender, of the fantasies and fears that have kept assault weapons on shelves and meaningful change off ballots. We need you to admit that you failed. And then, we need you to get out of the way.
Because we will not inherit a country where schools are killing fields. We will not inherit a country where politicians send condolences and then cash checks from the gun lobby. We will not inherit a country that teaches us to bleed quietly so others can stay comfortable in their bubble of delusion.
You may have forgotten what it feels like to be afraid. But we haven’t.
We feel it every morning when we walk through the front doors of our schools.
Every time we see a stranger in the hallway.
Every time the fire alarm goes off and we hesitate.
Every time we sit near the door so we can run.
Every time we wonder if this is the day our name will be read on TV.
This is our daily 9/11. And no one is coming to save us.
So we’re going to have to save ourselves.
© Photo
Chao Soi Cheong (AP) and Mark Lennihan (AP)
