What radicalized you?

With this new presidency, a lot has been on my mind, like everyone else. But one question that has kind of been going around (at least on TikTok) that pretty much explains how I'm feeling about this new term, what radicalized you? The funny answer is the Disney Channel movie "Lemonade Mouth" radicalized me, rewatch it and you'll understand. The serious answer is a lot of shit, but the first time I remember thinking to myself "Why didn't anyone do anything?" was the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I was 8 years old when it happened, I didn't understand why more people weren't as disturbed as I was, but unfortunately, that wouldn't be the first major school shooting I'd live through. The Parkland High School shooting made me realize "My government could care less about its people." This time I was 14, and the anger started to set in. I just remembered joining my middle school protest walkout because it was the least I could do and posting a shit ton on my Instagram story because of how infuriated I was that no one cared. It felt like it was just me and the couple other "woke" kids that felt so passionate about this, why do school shooting keep happening? Therefore, me wanting to ban guns/enforce gun control was the first thing that radicalized me. 

Another thing, which is more recent, is my job. I work at a public school in Downtown in an after-school program. A lot of these kids had to miss either kindergarten, first grade, or second grade because of the pandemic, so they're extremely behind in academics. One of my students, who is 10, has the same reading level as a 5-year-old, she should be learning how to write essays at the age of 10. Some kids don't even know how to spell "other" or how to multiply by twos or how to answer a question with more than one sentence, hell, some of these kids don't even know when their birthday is. And yet, the Department of Education is at risk of being taken away. Everything about this situation is something that I can't truly express in words but anger. This doesn't even cover the fact of how underfunded my school and so many other public schools are, so much to the point that my school doesn't even have money to buy supplies. Not to mention the number of books that are now banned, or school shootings that continue to happen, or how underpaid our teachers are, I could keep going but I'm pretty sure you get the point. 

There's a lot of stuff going on in my life currently, and the state of my country is something that will continue to stay in the back of my mind. I just wish I didn't have to live through this, I know it's part of history since humans are fickle beings and we have poor memory and we'll continue make the same mistakes over, and over again. But why do I have to keep living through this? It started in 2016, and it never ended for me. Of course I've been radicalized, there was never going to be a world where people around my age and I would not become radicalized. And trust me when I say, my fucked-up country and their lack of protection and justice is what made me radical. 

To end it off, fuck Donald Trump, and anyone who voted for Donald Trump should kill themselves. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.