Lessons I learned from the Arizona shootings

What happened has really hit home for a lot of my friends, not only because some of them grew up with me in Arizona, but because we are the generation who experienced Columbine as adolescents, 9/11 as teenagers, Virginia Tech as college students, and other horrific incidents. We feel like we’ve been here before. The discussion about violence, gun control, and greater screening of the mentally ill is nothing new. What is new is that for the first time there is a media climate that breeds greater polarization and anger because of the explosion of social media and the state of our politics. We breed it ourselves with the anonymity of the Internet, which has in turn bred the fear that has become a part of our daily lives. It is not just politics that has these sorts of scare tactics, but we now live in a world where a congresswoman can’t meet with her constituents at a grocery store without fearing for her life.