An odd thing happened after one of the most recent mass shootings in the United States: the kids there are old enough to figure out how the previous generations have failed them and active enough to want to do something about it.
Survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Fla., have taken to social media and forced those in charge to listen to them. As a result, there’s a feeling that with this shooting that killed 17, things will finally change – especially when it comes to the National Rifle Association and a tiny minority’s obsession with AR-15 assault rifles.
In the span of less than a couple weeks, political force starting with this group has made Sen. Marco Rubio squirm, made the most narcissistic president in U.S. history pretend to care and want to make some changes to gun laws, and forced major corporations to deal with the NRA a lot differently than they had in the past.
No more will the assault rifle worshippers be able to get cheaper group flights on certain airlines. It’s a huge start towards the positive change that we all need, and more than the previous generation was able to accomplish.
While I’m glad they are the generation to understand that political force and activism is the only way to enact change, I wish it hadn’t come to this. As a member of the generation than followed the baby boomers – we were dubbed Generation X by thinker Douglas Copeland before we really had a chance to understand how or why – it ought to have been us who affected this. Born in the mid-60s to the mid-80s, we were some of the first urban kids whose parents both worked and thus came home to an empty house after school.
With that much time to ourselves, sadly we were too polite, too ‘slacker’, too self-absorbed to even think that we had the power to do anything to affect anything other than our own general surroundings. Sometimes we even take credit for things we didn’t even have much to do with.
We have our community gardens and our food co-operatives but we haven’t come close to finding the causes or solutions to massive hunger. With the inspiration this generation has, maybe we could have done it.
Meanwhile, these kids, these post-millenials, this Generation Z, have grown up in the social media era where they know by now that there are no such things as privacy and little time for naval gazing. The accelerated pace that these kids have been forced to grow up with, the trends that are emerging quicker and dying quicker, have made this generation realize that the time to act is now, The time to engage those in power is in the very immediate future. Or else they’ll get left behind and put on the back burner.
There’s a way about these kids – I’ve chaperoned a field trip with my oldest (born in 2006) and there’s something about them that’s different than when I was that age. They’re still kids of course, doing silly kid things, but the future for them seems like it’s going to be better once they’re in charge. They understand each other better, show compassion and caring about a world beyond their own, in a way our generation never quite fully grasped.
It’s a great compliment to that generation (that I have two kids in) that it has somehow learned very quickly to adapt and change to the world that on the surface seems to give zero care towards them. We’ve labeled them and their immediate predecessors as lazy, entitled, etc. We don’t fully understand the culture that they’ve been raised in despite providing them with much of the means and the technology they use to communicate. Put it this way – an inspired generation of high school kids is taking on the NRA and winning through nothing more than public pressure.
Once the kids born in the 2000s take over the world – and it will be a takeover and not a gift from us – they’ll leave it in a much better place than we left it for them. Which is a better situation than we gave to them.
