You're right. Young people are drowned in bad news. But part of this is by choice. I don't consume any form of media in which I am unable to carefully curate my own content, meaning that Meta, X, IG, FB, and the rest are NOT feeding me that shit 24/7 because I like the dopamine hits and can't put it down.

That's another thing we can individually do for ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to change it for us. I do care about young people, quite a bit, and historically they as a moral group are on the right side of history. For example, it was the young people that clued the rest of us in that Israel was committing genocide, and worse still, just how overwhelmingly complicit we as a nation (US), our government and our corporations, really are in it. Even I had no idea, and I've been paying attention. It is the bravery of the young in openly demonstrating and protesting that has, again, showed the rest of us that there is still a sense of humanity in this nation.

But I can't curate their media consumption for them.

And yes, I was in my thirties when Columbine happened. And the mere fact that I can pull the name of a wildflower out of my ass twenty-six years later and you know exactly what I mean by it is proof of how deeply it cut at the time. We talked about it daily and it led the news not for weeks but for months. It wasn't 9/11, but it was close. IF anyone thinks I overreacted to the comment to which I responded above, that is nothing compared to the ostracization that person would have gotten twenty-six years ago.

That, of course, is when there was still an overriding sense of how we each contribute to our own environments, before most social media, and long before anyone got the bright idea to steer public opinion with it, much less the newest and ugliest form of the age-old divide-and-conquer strategy we're seeing now.

I don't blame anyone their self-preservation: as you can see from my first paragraph, I certainly engage in it myself. But self-preservation is one thing. Adding fuel to the fire with my own bored disinterest in your pain is quite another. And as you can see, I haven't done that either.

As for my comment, to be honest I would have just downvoted and moved on, had it not been for the puppet behind them going, "Downvoted for speaking truth!" No, I downvoted because what they wrote was a lazy, dishonest, inhumane, and all around shitty thing to say, with zero truth in it at all. And instead of slinking away, I decided to say WHY I downvoted.

We can't change the world one at a time. We have to band together. And that actually does happen, far more frequently than the "bad news" that is crafted to discourage us from starting would ever allow you to believe.

But until then, we can each think about how to improve our own experience, and take action to help ourselves that does not involve moving a Columbine-level mass killing to a lazy, bored, "just another day" comment in the language that we choose, or calling it "truth!" when someone else does it.

So let me ask you a question in return. Do you think that in general, readers are helped or collectively harmed by the normalization of horrific acts?