Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every generation seems to carry a date burned into its memory, a day so dark that it shapes how people remember the world before and after. For the Greatest Generation, it was December 7, 1941—the attack on Pearl Harbor, a sudden explosion of violence that dragged the United States fully into World War II. For Millennials, it was September 11, 2001—a morning when ordinary life was shattered as planes became weapons and the skyline of New York burned before the eyes of a horrified nation. For today’s younger Americans, January 6, 2021, may stand as that date—the day democracy itself was attacked from within, when the peaceful transfer of power nearly collapsed under a mob’s rage. These days are remembered because they rewrote history in ways no one could ignore. They were, in the truest sense, defining tragedies.

But what about the tragedies that don’t make it into the permanent national memory? The ones that don’t get carved into history books or repeated in annual memorial ceremonies? In the last two decades, our country has been scarred by another kind of violence—school shootings, mass killings, and random acts of terror in our own neighborhoods. Yet unlike Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the dates blur together. No one outside of Newtown, Connecticut may pause on December 14, the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Few people recall the precise day in April 1999 when Columbine High School erupted in bloodshed, even though it was supposed to be unthinkable then. The Las Vegas shooting in October 2017—the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history—claimed 60 lives and injured hundreds, but even that horrific moment slips further from our collective memory with every passing year.

Why do some tragedies define us, while others fade into the background noise of a country that has almost learned to expect them? Perhaps it is because Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and January 6 felt like attacks on the nation itself—acts of war, terrorism, or insurrection that demanded a response. But what does it say about us that when the violence comes from within, when it is inflicted on children in classrooms or music fans at a concert, we allow the dates to be forgotten? Maybe it is too painful to look at squarely. Maybe forgetting is easier than acknowledging that we live in a society where mass shootings happen so frequently that none of us can keep track anymore.

That truth is a tragedy in itself. We should not live in a country where children practice active shooter drills like fire drills. We should not shrug at the news of another shooting, chalk it up to the cost of “freedom,” and move on by the next news cycle. If Pearl Harbor demanded we enter a world war, and 9/11 demanded we reshape global security, then surely the countless school shootings and mass killings demand something too. They demand change—not just in laws, but in values, in what we are willing to accept as normal.

Every generation will have its defining day, but we should not allow those days to pile up endlessly, each one marked by grief and violence. The dates we forget are just as telling as the ones we remember. It is time to make sure the lesson of all of them is not that we can endure tragedy, but that we can prevent it.