KDWB, Minneapolis, St. Paul! I wake up at 6 a.m. exactly with my alarm clock, which has been set to the homegrown pop station of KDWB, I get up, shower, get dressed, eat, and brush my teeth then I’m off. It was just an ordinary day, one with sun, hardly any clouds, and yet the ground still had frost layering it from the departing winter. As I walked with a brisk pace to the bus stop to wait patiently for the yellow shuttle to take me off to school, my phone buzzed in my pocket, and rather subconsciously I pull out my phone to see that it is just another news flash about some global tragedy that had happened yet again. I boarded the bus and plopped down in my seat and rested my eyes as I knew the rest of the day ahead of me would be exceedingly draining.

First hour, Civics, otherwise known as social studies, we start off the day with CNN student news (later to be known as CNN 10), seeing flashes of another bombing, another shooting, all that registers is that I need to be taking notes. Almost without empathy I write about a family that has lost everything, bodies lying on the ground vacant of a soul and a beating heart,  a man who lost his entire family in an airstrike, wait what was his name? I scribble faster and faster, trying to keep up with the flow of information, the eternal stream that no matter how dull a day is, it shall always be there, story after story, yet with one thing recurring, war. The one thing that has always been recurring throughout history. None of these stories faze me, the class, or for that sake the entire nation, because it’s nothing new, it’s not original. 

New day, new experience… right? I wake up, get ready, eat, do some push-ups/ sit-ups, not enough to be fit, yet enough to make myself think I’m doing ok. Though it is a new day, I am still finding myself following the identical pattern as before, with the same shallow footsteps, the same lunchtime traditions, even the same unit in math. Today’s CNN student news is on North Korea tensions, with “Bob” and borders, cease fires and nuclear testing. As stressful as it is, nothing surprising, nothing to get us to stop from writing in preparation for the dreaded CNN news quiz we have every week on friday, from local terrorists to hundreds dying in a natural disaster, not one thing will take away from our notes, because god forbid, we get a question wrong.

That’s when I realized, someday, Earth is going to have a worldwide catastrophe, whether it’s war with North Korea or Russia, whether it’s global warming or water shortages, there will come a time when everything we know, every routine we have made to carry out our everyday lives, it will all come to an end, and that time is all up to the men in charge, the leaders. All of these terror attacks, the arguments between countries, the arguments between political parties, this is all stressing our world, and sooner or later, there will come the final push, the last blow, the straw that broke the camel's back. Living day to day waiting for my phone to buzz for that alert, the one with headlines streaming all over the news, the one that says “America At War” or “WW3” the one that declares that we change our lives, that we cannot function the same ever again, the one that forces us to live those experiences that couldn’t faze us before.