People

People

         Imagine being a happy girl around the age of thirteen, living her day to day life. You come home and your parents look at you and tell you tell pack your bags. When you ask why they tell you some of the people in the country don't like you, and are targeting you, your family, and community. You must go into hiding because you and your family are scared to die. The people you didn't want to find found you and are currently breaking into your new home. They grab you take you and your family with them, you are now off to somewhere horrible. They take you to a place with uniformed people who looked sad and malnourished. Later in the weeks you have been there, you die. You might have guessed who you were, you might have not. You were Anne Frank.
         Now pretend you are a little girl, so young you're in first grade. As you walk into the school people are yelling and screaming; you are scared, but you continue your path. Parents pull their children out of school because of who you are because your skin is different. The grown white men and woman are yelling, threatening, and scaring a little girl who is black. Growing up you will continue to get hate because of the color of your skin. Later in the future you are a brave, strong, educated, and a beautiful woman, proud of who she is. People targeted you because of the color of your skin, but that didn't stop you and now you are unstoppable. Who are you? You are Ruby Bridges.
Look later into the future you are now not one person but a group of people. You are just partying, having fun; you look around and see people just like you, happy and proud. Suddenly total panic ensues, gun shots can be heard everywhere, people are falling onto the ground. Part of you dies, the other part flees for their lives; there is nothing they can do. You were targeted because of who you love, and who you are. You might already know who you are, but if you don't, you are the victims of the Pulse Night Club shooting.          
         Now think of yourself as an even bigger group of people. It's the last day of the festival and you have had so much fun, now you are celebrating the last day excited to be there. Until you here a 'BANG!' echo throughout the area. Your heart drops to the pit of your stomach, and you do the only thing you can do; you run. As you make your way to the nearest exit you feel small chunks of you dying. People fall left and right, tears fall down your face, and screams make their way out of your lips. You finally reach and the outside where you see police, S.W.A.T., and paramedics, rushing to help do what they can. You rush to the ambulance to get checked out, the paramedic looks at the state you're in and lay you down. You are wounded and crying out of shock. Do you know who you are? As you sit there you might be horrified to say you are the victims of the Las Vegas shooting.
         Is it still okay to target people because of who they are? No matter race, religion, or sexuality there is never an excuse to kill or threaten people because they are different. The first three paragraphs describe three different discriminative incidents have occurred within a matter of eighty years. We think we are moving forward leaving discrimination behind but we aren't and it will haunt us till we accept that it is still there posing a problem to not only the country, but the world. The times described here were about breathing human beings, people. They are the same, but different; these people all were targeted, but for different reasons. The last incident is there to tell you murder in large groups still exists. The people at the music festival were innocent people who did nothing wrong, just the first three people described. These innocent people were killed and horrified, the Las Vegas shooter hurt and killed all those people because he wanted to. At this point in time he had no motive to kill these people, he did it because he felt like it. The message of my prompt is not that people were killed because of race, religion, or sexuality, but because they were all innocent. None of the people here deserved to die, or suffer through hate. Though you cannot turn back time to change these incidents, you can learn from them to make a difference now.