Josh Thomas, Special to The Denisonian–

Content warning: This article discusses graphic content such as violence.

Within five minutes of the news breaking that Charlie Kirk had been shot, I knew he was dead. It wasn’t because of a gut feeling or reporting. Instead, it was because I saw the blood gushing from his neck. 

A friend sent me the video. The worst part about it wasn’t that I watched someone die on my computer screen while in class; it was that it didn’t even faze me.

My reaction is just one of many from people of my generation. 

The friend who sent the video to me told me, “I had to delete it off my phone because I couldn’t stop watching it.”

Another friend had sent the video to him and texted him jokingly about the assassination, saying how “crazy” it was that it happened on a college campus and happened to Charlie Kirk, since he was known for sparking “debate” and “rage-baiting” liberal college students. 

But nothing from either one of my peers was about the graphic nature of the situation or the fact that we watched a man die on our phone and computer screens. 

My reaction isn’t an isolated response to the Charlie Kirk assassination. It seems almost every day, the news is full of another mass shooting, another murder, another climate crisis, another international conflict, another celebrity death, another political emergency. I am constantly bombarded with news that never seems to be about anything good. So when another shocking and horrible event happens, it doesn’t faze me as much as it did last time.  

So by the time I watched Kirk die in the middle of class on an unassuming Wednesday in September, it didn’t seem so shocking.

Maybe that is because I grew up with unfiltered access to everything on the Internet. My parents did a great job protecting me and guiding me through the mess, but there was only so much they could do when places like the subreddit r/fiftyfifty exist. As a young teenager, I remember sleepovers with friends where we would stay up late into the night and eventually end up on r/fiftyfifty. Not because we were looking for gruesome or disturbing content, but because it was a thrill and seemed like a funny thing to do at the time.

Maybe it is because of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield that depict the details of war. I remember as an 11-or 12-year-old playing these games with my older brother. I wasn’t thinking about what I was seeing; I was just playing a video game with my brother. But the reality of it was that I was seeing the violence and fighting of war at a young age, and that impacts young people whether they realize it or not. 

Maybe it’s all just a trauma response to the horrible things on X and in the news. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, one of many common emotional reactions after trauma is “feeling shocked, numb, or not able to feel love or joy” and “feeling nervous, helpless, fearful, [or] sad.” If I shut down and became helpless, sad, shocked, and numb after every headline or video I watched on X, I wouldn’t be able to live a normal life. I wouldn’t be able to function within our society, much less attend class and learn.

Is it that far-fetched to think that I, and many others in my generation, have just learned to compartmentalize and shut out feelings when we see or read something horrible that doesn’t directly impact us?

The argument that my generation is both too sensitive and desensitized to everything just doesn’t make sense. We can’t be both at the same time. 

We can, however, be traumatized. 

We can be worried that we might die at school.

We can be worried that by the time we are old, our kids will be looking for a new planet to live on because past generations ruined this one.

We can be worried that we will have to fight a war overseas and watch our friends die or return differently than when they left.

We can be worried that our government is trying to deport our friends and family because they don’t look “American” enough. 

We can be overwhelmed by the world.

It’s not that my generation should completely shut out our worries and emotions because those things are what make us human. However, everyone processes things differently, and sometimes the easiest thing to feel is nothing, so we don’t have to feel everything.

Josh Thomas ‘26 is a politics & public affairs and journalism double major from Chantilly, Virginia.