“Generation WTH” is an alarmingly vulnerable and thought provoking piece that accurately depicts the terrifying swirl of thoughts and emotions that surround the everyday lives of teenagers in our generation. Sarah Clemens goes into detail about the numbing fear she feels every waking moment of her life. She explains how our generation has inherited a broken earth,a divided one with polluted air and children who go to school “semi-ironically, like, we’re ready to die.” She writes about the fear and hopelessness, the painful awareness of the horrors of our world, that shape the blasé attitude of children these days.

Some days when I enter a school building I wonder if I’m next. I wonder if it’s only a matter of time until my luck runs out and I’ll be hiding in the corner of a classroom trying to remember the last thing I told my mom before I left the house, hoping it was something along the lines of “I love you”. Yet, when I hear news of school shootings, twenty, thirty miles away from my school, I brush it off. It sounds cold and cruel of me, but I’ve grown desensitized to the slaughter of innocent children because I know the possibility that I might be next is just a possibility I have to deal with, the cost of living in a country like America. In a strange way, pessimism for our future has bonded my peers together in a way optimism could not. We hold on to a sliver of hope for our future, however, because no generation can exist without the tiniest bit of hope.