I Was In 2nd Grade When I Was Taught About 9/11 And Were Shown Clips Of The Planes Shooting Through The

I was in 2nd grade when I was taught about 9/11 and were shown clips of the planes shooting through the buildings

I was in 3rd grade when I had to accept the fact I might be a victim of school shooting. That one day I will walk into school with the k-5 grade school fellow students and possibly be carried out in a body bag. I had accepted that fate. At the age of 9. Wasn't even double digit age. And I had to accept the fact that one day, I will not see my baby brother anymore because someone thought it was funny to shoot up an elementary school.

In 5th grade...I was in the classroom, when all of a sudden the announcement came on the loud speaker, that Sandy Hook elementary school was shot up. That happened a few cities away from me. I was in 5th grade when I heard that someone took the life of those who hadn't even got to experience 1st grade. They never finished kindergarten.

In 9th grade I was still in class when someone outside started shooting at the windows of my school. It never made the news.

The ache left my throat in 3rd grade when I heard another school had bullets crashing into students whose lives had barely started.

I was in 1st grade when I had experienced racism first hand. A majority of my classmates were treated like garbage, never given a sticker or a prize from the prize box when we did good because we weren't white. But these 2 kids who had the same skin color as my teacher, were treated like royalty. Good or bad, it was clear who were the favored students.

I was taught to fear cops at the age of 4, when I asked my mother why we couldn't file a report, that our one bedroom apartment was broken into and our rent money gone. She told me they would deport her even though she was a legal citizen. And they would separate me and my infant brother because they could. They still can.

War wasn't fun to play anymore after seeing and hearing what happened in those camps back during WW2. I was still in elementary school.

I was always taught to be strictly prohibited in the 2 gender binary system and cried every night ever since I was 5 at the thought that one day I would have to marry a man who doesn't love me. To a man who could do as he pleases to me. To a man who I couldn't stand up to or else any and every violation of my body would be my fault. I was only 5 years old.

By the time I was in 7th grade I was numb to death. I wasn't afraid to die anymore because dying before your time is up is inevitable in America. The death of children was normalized, the death of innocent and wrongly convicted people are not taboo, death of anyone who wasn't a cis white straight person was no longer a rare possibility.

It shouldn't be.

It really shouldn't be.

Spread the word. Spread the word. Spread the word, if you heard.