When Tigard-Tualatin became the first Oregon district to close down, beginning with Friday, Mar. 13, students didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye. First came a wave of excitement, as any school closures bring; just two weeks, that’s what we were told. 

Six months later and we have accepted the grim reality that for the foreseeable future, we will be in distance learning. 

We first saw the lack of organization and communication from March to June, when our teachers answered our questions with the same three words: “I don’t know.” What little positivity remained of having a decreased workload couldn’t hold up to the fact that our entire psychological needs were left unfulfilled by an invisible virus. 

Indeed, the end of school marked the start of a changing world when the murder of George Floyd sparked public outcry for institutional racism all around the world. Protests arose in every corner of the world, but not like in our home, Portland. Federal troops in paramilitary gear kidnapped protesters in unmarked vans and made us fearful of the city we lived in. It felt like an invasion.

Our seemingly-unbothered selves, which had waved white flags at the pandemic, charged our efforts against a controllable enemy: systemic racism in policing. We fought together and against each other. Some cried for police reforms, others for the complete abolition of police departments around the country; we might’ve been separated in ideas, but the protests touched everyone. Perhaps we didn’t learn math, biology or chemistry, but we learned about the people around us and reflected on ourselves in solitude.

Then came the wildfires one week before school. Waves of orange, red and yellow raged through our states and led to the evacuation of more than 100,000 Oregonians. The blue skies once looked forward to after Oregon’s rain season bled red. One morning we glimpsed outside and thought to ourselves, “Yes, it can get worse.” The problem was more pronounced than ever before: C-L-I-M-A-T-E C-H-A-N-G-E. So we educated ourselves some more on how little time we have left before an irreversible catastrophe. 

2020 made Generation Z  grow up. We got used to tuning out our own thoughts, so that when the pandemic came and took away our social lives and the noise we had created, suddenly our thoughts became amplified and revealed our deepest fears. In those moments of being alone, but not feeling lonely, as we are with ourselves, came an epiphany of how our own cruel habits have often torn down our community. For a generation defined by technology, the pandemic made us more human. 

George Floyd’s murder sparked a cultural shift. Once there were bystanders on the sidelines, who in their hearts knew the right thing to do, but the rise of advocacy for anti-racism and spoken protection for people of color turned those bystanders into supporters. For a generation defined as “lazy,” the protests showed that we are courageous enough to fight for the world we want to live in. 

Climate change, once a dividing factor, brought people together. People shared links, tips and posts on how to prepare for evacuation. Communities forewent their beliefs, instead focusing on relieving the emotional and physical loss of wildfires. Through that genuine concern for human lives and the display of climate change’s impact, the deniers became believers, because they now understand that it is not a hoax. For a generation so separated, we proved that we show up for each other when it matters, and when we recognize each other’s goodness, we change each other’s minds.  

The bad hasn’t gone away yet, but this is still a new beginning. We won’t get to the good if we don’t get out of the bad. The only way of getting out of this is to continue fighting for each other and hold on to the hope there is a light outside of this tunnel, for the childhood we should have been given but was stolen away.