This Generation
By Hannah Cushing
Photos by Ellie Zupancic
"Those kids are a gunshot wound"
They say It like they're surprised
As if we are the ones who sit in silence waiting for change to come
Like we don't hide our guns under our bed sheets
But we don't fill our guns with bullets
We don't shoot to kill
Instead we stuff our guns with words, and intelligence
With compassion and selflessness
Where no room for inequality can squeeze through
We shoot out our voices for those who can't be heard
We are the change people need because
Somewhere over seas a girl is being sold at 11 years old
But here she's getting an iPhone
To read about unarmed people being shot in back
even though they weren't meant to die in the first place
We are a gunshot wound
We are the “hopeless generation”
Because the ones who came before stomped on our heads
and told us “The world is just a cruel place”
as they shoved numbers and letters in our face
But the only cruelty was them
They took our minds and left us
with weapons we didn’t even want to use
Because “what’s the use” when
we began seeing that we couldn't actually make changes
That even when we recycled
or loved everyone
The earth was still being harmed and we were still being cut down
And now we are berated for paying too much attention
to our phones than the world
But what happened to “The world is just a cruel place”?
We’ve tried
And we try
We are the hopeless generation
We are the ones who won’t give up
For the girl over seas and the man in the street
For the woman pleading for someone to hear her
For the boy who thinks he has to be masculine
For the ones who feel they don’t belong
For our future children So that they may live
in a world that accepts them
better than we ourselves have been
And they can sleep soundly
knowing they are safe on earth
instead of searching for a way off of it
