I don’t like alarms, and I’m confident that many share the sentiment. However, I wonder how many dislike a special class of alarms: people. Unlike normal alarms, it has nothing to do with volume. Rather, it has to do with the words; the words inspire alarm. The mindset inspires alarm. Some people alarm me. 

I can feel my tone cause your body to tense up. How long before you roll your eyes? 

The people who alarm me are the ones who would never admit to being a feminist but secretly wouldn’t mind equality. The devil’s advocates that wonder why everyone can’t just get along because, at the end of the day, it’s just politics. The people that do nothing. They swear that doing nothing in itself is doing something, but doing nothing does nothing when something happens. 

Their teeth chatter in the cold as they attempt to speak up, but their privilege shuts them up. 

It’s really cold.

Their silence encourages violence. 

Their silence is violence. 

Have I triggered an eye roll yet? After all, this has been the song of social media for the past year. The longest trend to have existed. 

Some people alarm me. Like the people who tiptoe around political correctness but are quick to come to the defense of “dark humor.” The people who think that the rapist’s sentence should be as short as the outfit that surely invited it. The people who’re quick to complain about the world going soft like snow and label the offended as sensitive. 

Snowflakes. 

It’s getting colder. Not even gaslighting can keep us warm. 

You don’t have to have experienced oppression to acknowledge it. Broken records that are hopeful enough to expect change tell us, “You don’t have to have experienced oppression to acknowledge it.”

We simply cannot find enough ways to rebrand the very first lesson our parents taught us: compassion. 

How can people simply not care? Is that not a defining characteristic of what it means to be a person? 

“Their silence is violence.”

Ouch, that’s a little cold. 

Is this what it takes for them to see that we are freezing?

by Foday Yanssaneh, 11