It’s been a week and a half since the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. The news of the shooting threw me for a loop, as did the news that it was the 18th shooting of 2018…I hadn’t heard of the others.
It’s heart-breaking to see these kids go through such an awful experience. It’s frustrating to see the pro-gun advocates trotting out the same old rhetoric about “Second Amendment rights” and how “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” when people – children – are dying. It’s horrifying to realise that a machine expressly designed for the purpose of killing matters more to some people than the lives of their fellow citizens.
The strength of the teens in the aftermath of this tragedy is one of the best and worst things I’ve ever seen. It’s wonderful because it’s a good reminder that teens are people, with dreams and aspirations and hopes and fears, who can articulate all of those things.
It’s awful because these kids shouldn’t have to be this strong, not about this. They shouldn’t have to stand up to politicians and national organisations because some jerk with an AR-15 shot up their world.
Teens catch a lot of dismissiveness from adults for being immature and too attached to technology and blah blah blah. But I remember being a teenager; it wasn’t that long ago. And yeah, I was lacking in life experience, maybe, and being mature for my age still meant I acted like an immature (young) adult, but I was well-educated. I was articulate. I had valid ideas and beliefs, responsibilities and cares. And these kids do, too. I’m so proud of what they’re doing, what they’re accomplishing.
What’s kind of interesting to see is the of the responses from the adultier adults than me, the parents and grandparents of Millennials and Generation Z.* Some of them are apologising for not doing more, for not fighting harder, for leaving Millennials and GenZs to deal with this horrible blight on the US political landscape. And I understand that, I do. It’s nice to see people acknowledging the mistakes that have been made, to get some respect and empathy rather than “Millennials are obsessed with avocadoes!” claptrap.
* As an ’88 baby, I apparently qualify as a Millenial. I don’t know whether to be delighted or terrified…I’m nearly 30, for the love of all the gods.
But some of the things being said have made my hackles raise. Not just the ones spewing hate and vitriol, although all of the conservative or centrist jerks hounding the survivors should just…stop. The ones that are really frustrating me are the ones that say “Do better than us. Fix these problems. Be strong for us.”
And…OK. I’m sure this is not the spirit in which it was intended, I’m sure these people aren’t saying this, but it sounds an awful lot like they’re saying: “Children, we can’t do anything to fix this, so we’re washing our hands of the issue and leaving you to fix it.” instead of “Children, we haven’t succeeded, but we will listen to you and support you as we all fight for the world you deserve.” These people sound like they’re giving up instead of becoming our allies, and it’s like…NO. You don’t get to give up. You don’t get to back down now. You can’t just leave it to a bunch of teenagers, you can’t put that on their shoulders. No one is expecting you to fix it on your own, but you can’t wash your hands of this issue.
I think this sense of helplessness and hopelessness in the older generations comes from a lack of intercultural literacy in Western societies. We’re quick to appropriate individual aspects of from cultures because they’re “cool” or “trendy”, but when it comes to understanding how different cultures function in mundane ways, we’re a little more ignorant.
The first time I lived overseas on my own was an eye-opener. I was 19 and had moved to Vancouver, Canada. A lot of things were the same as in Australia or New Zealand, but there were some things, big or little, that were very different, and some of those differences caught me off-guard.
I had taken my own experience for granted, and assumed that the way I knew to do things was the same everywhere. The same thing happened when I was studying in France and the US. Sometimes you don’t realise that something that you consider “normal” is actually very strange until you step outside of your usual experience.
I don’t know how many US Americans truly believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. I know there’s a large portion of the population who think it used to be great, at some unspecified point in history, and who want to make it that way again. But here’s something I want US Americans to know:
Children in Australia don’t do active shooter drills. Not as a matter of course.
Consider that thought for a minute. Roll it around in your head. Examine it.
Children in Australia don’t do active shooter drills.
Your knee-jerk reaction to this is probably “Well, of course not, you don’t have guns!”, but here’s the thing: we do. A lot of Australians own guns. According to an article on The Conversation, in 2016 we had more guns in Australia than we had in 1996, when the Port Arthur massacre occurred. (link) The Small Arms Survey, administered in 2007, tells us that, at the time, there were 10 to 30 guns for every 100 Australians. (link) I mean, it’s nothing like the 75 guns per capita that the US has, but it’s not a small number: 2.4 million to 7.2 million guns for 24.5 million people.
But children in Australia don’t do active shooter drills.
When I was in school, we did fire drills at least once a year – bush fires are a way of life in Australia, especially during the drought that lasted my entire high school career – but we never had to worry about people with guns. My mum and I moved to Australia just two years after the Port Arthur Massacre, in which 35 people were killed and 24 people were injured. There was only one time in my entire schooling career when a school – my second high school – instituted a lock-down because there was a suspicious person on campus.
Once.
We waited in our classrooms, sitting on the floor, lights and fans off. It was dim, and hot, and it was boring as hell. I was reading, or maybe writing something, I can’t really remember. Rumours started while we waited in our classrooms, then ran rampant once the lock-down was lifted: the guy had a knife, or a gun, or was drunk, or had just walked through the part of the campus that wasn’t built up yet, not knowing it was part of a school. No one knew for sure what the hell had happened, only that a man had walked onto the campus during class time and was out of the ordinary.
But at no point were we in honest fear for our lives. At no point were we legitimately concerned about being injured or killed, about seeing our fellow students or our teachers injured or killed. My ability to read people is hit-and-miss, but my teacher didn’t seemed especially terrified or tense.
This is the life your children could have. This is the life your grandchildren could have. This is the life you and your fellow citizens could have.
Australia and the US aren’t that different. Sure, we’re younger than you, and we didn’t have a revolution and then a civil war, and our population is a lot smaller, but there are more similarities in our past and present than differences. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and to be honest we’re still making them. But we didn’t make a mistake when we enacted stricter gun control. It’s OK to admit that you’re not the best at something. Just work to be better. Work to fix it.
Your nation’s future – your children, your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren, your fellow citizens, you – depend on it.
