As I accompanied my father at the grocery store earlier this Sunday evening, I watched the nightly news; a Spanish channel was telling the story of last Friday’s horrid events once more, giving voice to the anguish and hurt felt by the victims’ families, peers, and the rest of the world. I picked at the fruits and vegetables and asked what so many ask: Why them and not myself? Why violence and not tender compassion? Why do people act this way? Just why? So many questions, and at the same time one unforgettable answer which rots us to the core, seizes us from finding the truths within ourselves, when it should do the very opposite.
Each day, on this road we travel, we are constantly met with the possibility of head-on collisions with seemingly impractical but evidently real, life-changing accidents. It is painfully simple; there is no way out of what awaits us—what happens. Those innocent victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have the ability to teach a valuable lesson, they will not live to tell nor practice themselves
It is not a difficult concept. Live fully and learn from what keeps us from doing so; however, so many of us are guilty of finding this task impossible to live out. Ideally, humanity would be maintained, and none would have to learn from cruel reality—this is never the case. It is not possible to fit all that we need to remember, and learn from this tragedy—from all the tragedies throughout history—in one single editorial. I do have one specific wish.
Students and readers, I urge you, compel you, to take advantage of your time in school—it might seem strange to jump from idealistic life lessons to something so overly preached into our heads’ bur finish school and earn your high school diploma.
It is not difficult to take yourself back to more delicate years, to remember how you learned and grew and made your own sense of the world. Yet, while those important years mean next to nothing to most of us, these present years, days even, mean even less, as we drag ourselves out of bed and through seven hours of often tedious, if not frustrating work. We are forgetting how fragile our time spent is.
Readers, I want you to witness this connection with me; those children were cheated of life— a life which they were not yet aware of, not yet mindful of all its beauties and contrasting imperfections. All of us are still here to take so much from this life, but we don’t give any of it back; we do not make the little details last forever. What time we spent living is gone, but we remain; the space between is invalid. The victims’ time, also expired. It is sad that on the last day of that week, they met the end, while the lot of us are only beginning. We stand on the very brink of the rest of our lives and we don’t even know it.
Please take every day; hold it in your heart and remember what it feels like for those who cannot feel it. Finish school, not only for yourself but for those who can not return—those who will never complete. Remember what you have learned, what you are learning, for those who can not be further educated. Live fully to sustain yourself; live to keep those now gone alive.
