Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run.
Twenty-five years later, and with Mendo now a mother herself, the trauma from that horrific day remains close on her heels.
It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she had visited a lot while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde, Texas.
I’m angry that our parents’ generation did absolutely nothing to fix the issue after that happened. Now they cling to power and still refuse to help.
Yeah, they tried to ban violent video games instead of doing anything of substance. But at least that showed they cared, in some weird way, even if they were misguided. It’s like that failed (and rightly so), so they just gave up.
I’ve told my parents that the legacy of their generation will be the opposite of their parents once they are gone, because they’ve completely fucked over everyone that comes after them and we’ll be the ones telling the future generations who to curse for creating the hellscape they’ll be forced to survive in