GoodNews

LOCAL 30 MAY 2018 Good News • South Florida Edition The World is Crying Ariel Feldman High School Senior The world is crying. As I am sitting on my comfortable bed tapping on keys to form these sentences, four people will no longer be able to do the same. Four people died today, April 22nd, in a Tennessee Waffle House. Four people will no longer get to return home to their fami- lies. Four people will never get to finish their breakfast. Four people will no longer get to live out the lives they thought they were made for. This is why we march. This is why we walk out. This is why we demand change. Not just for students, not just for teenagers, but for all inhabitants of the place we call our home. The place peo- ple come to live out their dreams. America. My name is Ariel Feldman, and I am the founder of the FTL- walkout. The journey to the day of April 20th was a long and hard one. A journey that did not start just days before, not months, not even years. This journey started before I was even born. On April 20th, 1999, two students made their way into Columbine High School and proceeded to shoot as many people as they could, killing 13 and injuring countless others. This event shook the na- tion. But it did not change it. Since Columbine there have been over 193 school shootings in the United States. I am 17 years old, and if you divide it up equally, there have been over 11 school shootings every year that I’ve been alive. At least one shooting for almost every month I’ve been on this planet. This is unaccept- able. This is all I have ever known. But this will not be all I will ever know. My generation has unfortunately been named as “The school shooting generation” and we do not accept that title. We will not sit idly by as we wait for things to change. This is the reason we are raising our voices and speaking out. This is the rea- son we want change. We want change so that we don’t have to be afraid when we walk in to school each morning. So we don’t have to think about the quickest exit points in the case that someone comes into an as- sembly with a gun. So we don’t have to hold our friends from Douglas while they sob over their lost classmates, over their dead friends, over their never ending panic attacks, over their PTSD that is now equivalent to that of a soldier returning home from war. Children should not be think- ing about these things. We should be too young to experi- ence these things. Everyone in the country should be too young to experience these things be- cause “these things” these shoot- ings should never have happened in the first place. But, as I say that we should be too young to experience these things. We have. Firsthand. But we are not too young to do some- thing about it. This is why I founded the FTLwalkout under the wings of the National School Walkout. Our plan was to join a couple hundred students from schools in Students from top left: Nicole Rodrigues, Zoey Boyette, Evelyn Martin. Middle: Anna Hopson, Angie DeStefano, Amanda Hotte. Bottom/front: Matthew Ray, Ariel Feldman . Photo by Paul McAllister