With the recent tragedies that have struck Newtown, Connecticut and our neighbors St. James, it seems appropriate to dedicate a part of the paper to the lives that have been lost.

On Dec. 14, a man shot his mother and went to an elementary school and opened fire upon young children and the adults trying to protect them. I know what you’re thinking, “I’m sick of hearing about it.” But how can you be sick of hearing about a tragedy? I understand that all the news tends to do is bring in politics and deflect from the actual situation. What’s real is that young children – the age of our younger siblings, nieces, nephews and for some of us, our children – never came home to their family. They will never get a chance to live.

So, my question is, why is the media giving us apathy toward things that matter? School shootings, suicide bombers, the Syrian government continuously bombing their own cities and killing their own citizens and all of those other things most people are ignorant and/or apathetic towards, is all courtesy of media coverage, or lack thereof.

But, for those of you who haven’t heard, something struck a little closer to home on Friday as well. Two St. James seniors, Nikki Stanley and Lexi Bartlett, were traveling from Rolla on I-44 when they hydroplaned, flipping off of the road and went through many trees. It is rumored that both girls, wearing no seatbelts, were ejected through the windshield, and the man in the backseat had survived.

No, two girls dying around the same age as our closest friends is not a lesson of “WEAR YOUR SEATBELT!” or “DON’T DRIVE WHEN IT’S RAINING,” but more or less a lesson of how fragile life is -how quickly a life, a friends life, or our own can be taken away – that will never be understood.

Whether you pray to a god or believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster for irony, dedicate a moment of thought to the people that are teenagers, just like us, that don’t get the privilege to see another day. Those two girls could have been anyone. It could have been me, one of my friends, my parents, my brother.

I’m not trying to take away from the suffering of the Stanley and Bartlett families, or am I trying to take away from the death of two beautiful girls and countless innocent children – I’m trying to make my dear readers realize how unsure life is, and how easy death is. So hug your parents, hugs your friends, hug that kid sitting beside you that you’ve never really noticed and hug yourself. We should love all and everyone around us, because you never know if you’ll see that person tomorrow.

Life is a privilege, love isn’t easy. Don’t ever take anyone for granted, don’t live like you’re dying, but live like every day is your last.