My middle school algebra teacher turned six on Dec. 7, 1941. His birthday lunch was cut short by the radio alerts announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. He, his friends, and his mother sat around his cake and cried. 

In fact, every time he told that story, he cried.

I wish we could go back to the days before Americans were desensitized. I wish I could cry like my teacher could about today’s tragedies: school shootings, COVID-19 deaths, human trafficking. Anything. 

It’s the way parents sometimes tear up about 9/11 — the way my mom told me and my brothers about Sandy Hook. 

It’s a sorrow bigger than yourself, and it’s largely unfelt anymore. I’m so nostalgic for this time so many of us never knew. It was starting to end by the time Gen Z started gaining consciousness.

Like many of my peers, I have been desensitized to the onslaught of school shootings and terror attacks in recent years. The recent Perry, Iowa, shooting was just a story I clicked past on the Snapchat discover page. Even abortion, something which Hillsdale students on the whole really care about, has become blasé — a dinner party topic or a statistic to bolster a point in class. 

How long have we been able to talk about dead Americans without blinking an eye? 

Oftentimes, in fact, people go so far to resist feeling sad about things that work against them politically. Atrocities become “another school shooting for the libs to complain about.” 

It’s so easy to post a graphic on your Instagram story and then push the problem back under your mind’s rug. “Three injured, one dead. When will we finally limit the Second Amendment? Praying hands emoji.”

We don’t want to dwell on tragedies once the public advocacy box is ticked. That’s what Americans have come to value in recent years. But we should feel awful, especially in private.  

Sending thoughts and prayers is a cliche, but probably what we ought to be doing. Think about dead kids — hell, dead anyone — let it consume you for an hour or two. Pray, meditate, or whatever works. Get sad. Get angry.

Not only does real, emotive sorrow help build calluses for tragedy in our own lives, but it might help get back to a sort of national feeling, too.

I hope that our generation can stop being ruled by apathy and manage to muster as much change as people keep talking about. I don’t think we should be waging Bush-ian wars 24/7, or inserting ourselves into World Wars, but yesterday’s America knew how to rally. Maybe we could feel that connected again, not due to some unprecedented tragedy, rather over normal ones.

The next time horror catches you off guard — and trends dictate that there will be a next time very soon — huddle around your own lunch table, with your own family, and try to cry. If enough people do it, it won’t be something we need to tell everyone about, it’ll just be understood. Wouldn’t being sad like that be nice?