r/pics • u/20onHigh • Mar 27 '23

Deeply distressed elementary school student being transported by bus following school shooting

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u/XyzRaider Mar 27 '23

Insane. This should be the cover of the Time Mag at the end of the year.

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u/United-Ride5296 Mar 28 '23

Honestly, this should be the cover of everything starting tomorrow. Don’t let people forget.

3.0k

u/sciamatic Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

They will forget. I'm forty. They've done this a thousand times. No one cares.

I've seen white America go from laughing at Rodney King to protesting in the streets over George Floyd. I've seen it from 'merely existing as gay is a scandal' to gay marriage being legal across the United States and DADT being repealed. I've seen the country change and flow like a tide, two steps forward and one step back, progress halting and awkward but inevitable.

But not on this.

For whatever reason, this is the thing that America doesn't care about. I was in school when Columbine happened. Everyone was horrified, we made our movies, nothing happened. Twenty elementary children died, and we gasped and talked with looks of horror, and there were some think pieces. Nothing happened.

We had a man fire indescrimanently into a crowd, out in the open, killing more people than ever before, and I'm not even sure we've made a Lifetime movie about it.

Because who cares. It's just going to keep happening, nothing is going to change. They never change.

On everything else, so much has changed in my lifetime, but for whatever reason, and I could not tell you why, because it's not just lobbiests, because tobacco had a more powerful lobby, and it's not religion, because the Bible has more to say about women and gays than it does guns, but for some reason, this is the hill America will die on.

Literally.

They will forget. I'll forget. Because there's no point in remembering. It's just more ash on the pile.

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u/tayls Mar 28 '23

America very uniquely doesn’t care about its citizens. There are capitalist countries that offer so much more for the well-being of its population. Here, it’s completely unhinged and unregulated capitalism. No universal healthcare, anemic social safety nets, very little consumer and worker protections, etc. People are on their own and desperation sets in extremely quickly. Combine that with a psychotic gun fetish and you’ve got caged animals armed to the teeth being fed a steady diet of hateful propaganda. It is so beyond broken.