This generation was the first of its kind for many reasons- one of the most notable being the average person's decreased confidence in safety, and another being how desensitized people have become. Tragedy and horrific crime have become common, and death has managed to change my outlook on life and the world at the young age of seventeen.

The most well-known American tragedy was 9/11, the first of many terrible events I have lived through. At age five, I couldn't fully understand the concepts of mass murder or terrorism, and my ignorance made the event less horrifying. I couldn't be panicked or mourn deeply at five years old, but I vaguely understood what had happened: not what it meant. Beginning with 9/11, I grew up with tragedy, just as everybody else my age has. Decades ago, people were much less worried about safety. Hitchhiking was common, because there wasn't a fear that every car one got into was driven by a psychopath. Children would be left alone at young ages and nobody worried that they'd be kidnapped. Today, people have to take utmost care to avoid any sort of situation that involved risk, because risk has become so much greater.

Danger flourishes as people become more and more desensitized. What shocked a nation in the 60s might not make the front page today. Recently, a string of shootings has taken the lives of dozens of Americans. The first of its kind was Columbine, an incident that nobody could have imagined. It put the entire country into a state of shock. Fast forward a few years, the Virginia Tech shooting is the newest tragedy. Years later, a dozen people are killed in a movie theater, and soon after, almost two dozen five-year-olds are shot to death. While each of these incidents were sick and horrifying, it seems as though adults always seem to take it the hardest. There are some exceptions, but personally, I can't be surprised by events like these. I feel grief, but I've known terrible things since I was a child. Adults are usually heartbroken, blindsided by sadness and unable to comprehend the amount of pain they feel. That kind of emotion is hard me to experience, because unlike adults, who feel as though their legs have been taken out from under them, I've watched people fall my entire life, and I'm always aware of the possibility.

Death has played somewhat of a big role in my life, and death has turned me into a pessimist. Once, when I was probably six or seven years old, I asked my mother, "Why is this one so important? People die every day, why don't they care about the rest of them?" after hearing a lot about a murder in the media. Looking back, the words "people die every day" casually coming from a first or second grader's mouth aren't completely natural. Death being so commonplace to a child is a scary thing, and proves jut how much it can affect a persons life.

I recently lost a friend, and his death was the first to ever fully catch my off guard. He was twenty years old and it may have been less shocking had there been some freak accident, or even a suicide, but there wasn't. Being somewhat desensitized to death hadn't made me any less shell-shocked when Derek died, but his death is another in a string of events that affect my outlook on the world. When somebody else dies, will I be as caught off guard as I was when Derek died? I'm seventeen years old today, and I don't think seventeen years is anywhere near long enough for somebody to be used to death. Maybe I was born in somewhat of an unlucky time period, to have lived throughout events like 9/11 and the shootings of late, but the deaths of all of those people combined with the deaths of people I know have managed to shape me into the person that I am today.