Just ahead of finals week at Brown University, a gunman opened fire. He killed two students and injured eight more. That Tuesday, an M.I.T professor died after being shot in his home. The same week 13 years earlier, 28 people died at another school shooting–the one that was supposed to mean “never again,” but meant only a number to marvel upon when they happened, again and again. 

I applied to Brown University. As a college-aspiring senior at a public high school, all-too-familiar gun violence in an academic space is only more devastating, and the collective replay of horrifying statistics hits too close to home.  

I am not alone. My voice is among the chorus of a generation raised to practice for an active shooter and angry at the system which keeps us mourning. But anger is not the same as hopelessness. To demand better in a country of bullets is, undeniably, a grasp at hope. It is far easier to surrender in righteous anger than it is to cling to hope. 

I still cling.

In part, it’s because I know there are attainable, more worthwhile approaches to the violence America faces. The ever-predictable “thoughts and prayers” response and subsequent outrage is a fire consistently stoked throughout the media, drawing no shortage of due criticism. Since the manhunt at Brown, presumptions about the social and political alignment of the shooter have, of course, circulated online. It is another familiar and futile scrutiny. Once again, tireless attempts to identify the politics, ethnicity, and religion of the perpetrator gain widespread attention, as if knowing these things will get us closer to healing. When we misrepresent the source of tragedy as a single person (or worse, a targeted population), we let slip the system that platforms their violence. Our job, as an informed voter base in any party, is to stray from cop-out accusations that further divide us. 

In light of differing responses to tragedy, It’s important to realize their proponents undoubtedly represent various corners of social and political structures. So, when conservatives and liberals alike react with agony–however different in capacity and sentiment–to an event, it’s not because our intellectual traditions have suddenly overlapped. It’s because we are all confronting the same monster: the output of a system rich on guns but starved for legislation.

Perhaps what bothers me most about those fruitless responses is that they imply hopelessness, and that is a particularly dangerous feeling. When human events are cast in increasingly despairing rhetoric, they feed an ever-growing subscription to extremism. Take the MAGA right, for example: despair is the fuel for insisting that more intolerance is the answer to America’s problems. The left is not immune, either; increasing percentages of young Americans on either side of the spectrum are accustomed to more political violence than ever before. Between ongoing domestic tragedy and unthinkable scales of devastation abroad in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, we all are implicated not only in mourning, but in the fallout of despairing ideologies. Intolerance is a rational consequence of hopelessness. 

The miniscule progression of gun control legislation, foregrounding a chronicle of victim blood and casualties, is a deafening wake-up call to the long road of healing this country must tread. But on that road, then, it becomes necessary to move forward with hope: to foreswear bitterness and break another cycle of victimization by treading softly on people and hard on the systems that surround them. 

When these crises implicate us all, they entreat our shared humanity: our ability to hope for one another by demanding better from our systems. As Bryan Stevenson wrote, it is “the kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness.”