Dear Knight Life Staff,
On June 12, 2016, a man opened fire on the LGBT nightclub ‘Pulse’ in Orlando Florida. 49 people, predominantly Latin Americans, were killed that day while 53 were injured and will have to live the rest of their lives with the trauma that following witnessing your people be murdered in front of you. This was the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11 and yet you have nothing reporting it on your site.
You have multiple article talking about shootings and domestic terrorist attacks in the U.S. You’re most recent one being about “growing up in post-9/11 America.” I’m not saying 9/11 wasn’t a terrible, horrible event. But 102 LGBT U.S. citizens were attacked in a place that was meant to celebrate who they were and you only barely mentioned the city in your gun control article. As a transgender minority, I’m personally offended. Not just by you, but by the school as well.
The next Monday following the attack, I had to ask the office if they were going to take the flag down to half-staff. They did, however the day after it was back to full-staff. The sheer disrespect I felt in that moment was astounding. Even more so when I heard no one talk about it. Not in my government class, not around the halls, not at lunch, and especially not on your website.
I don’t expect an article now, but I just want to express how disappointed I am of the way everyone handled it. It’s been six months since the largest terrorist attack in the U.S since 9/11, yet no one has uttered a word about it for months. We want to call ourselves progressive and an ally when we couldn’t even remember to talk about what could have been done to stop something like this.
The thing is we were making progress. We were talking about the hate crime against the LGBT community and gun control. And then the media does it’s favourite thing and diverts the attention from change and what really mattered to make a new meme or trend. Pankop calls media the ‘watchdog of the government.’ But nowadays, it seems like media’s just another one of the government’s goons.
Signed,
Connor Eliott Wilger
