I am angry. I have been very angry before, but never like this. It’s the type of anger that makes you want to punch through something, hoping that it will somehow fix the problem or make you forget it when you know perfectly well that it won’t. I heard about 20 seconds of an audio recording. Twenty seconds that made me feel the darkest parts of humanity. Twenty seconds that broke my unwavering expectation that when something is horribly wrong, people will run to fix it. It made me look at something I had overlooked before, the people around me. I had thought that their different thoughts were only that, different. I thought that when it really came down to it, we were all human. I don’t know if I was right. My hands are quivering as I write this, because the worst part is there is nothing I can do. Actually, the worst part is that I could do something if I were only three years older. At 15, my hands can do little more than type to express my anger. At 18, they could fill in a ballot. In Nazi Germany, people turned their heads while others were cruelly slaughtered because of their religion and their ethnicity. Where they came from. They were murdered, and people cheered. They clapped for the man who made it happen. I thought that this was the past. I thought that a child’s tears would motivate a man to change. Today, I heard children cry for 20 seconds. Today, I heard people clap for the man who did it. I heard people cheer when their parents were forced back into a slaughterhouse. I saw people turn their heads when the pictures appeared on their television screens. I saw a man listen for 20 seconds to children crying. The man turned and walked away.
Mason Hintermeister
Mount Airy
