I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted people to act the morning after Pulse, but I thought it inappropriate to go on with business as usual; the barista at my usual coffee shop who smiled while taking my order seemed complicit in some kind of irreverence. Still, the trains in New York were running, and people were working, so I took my coffee and put my head back into the chaotic business of journalism that day — making phone calls to people on the ground in Orlando, while texting friends and acquaintances to remind myself they were alive, even though I knew they must be.

In the slow, crawling minutes of that day, I remember watching gay journalist Owen Jones storm off the set of a Sky News interview. The host, Mark Longhurst, and his co-panelist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, were insisting that the shooting was a tragedy for human beings in general, not just queer people. There, at that familiar impasse queer people know too well — at the unbridged gulf between identities — Jones removed his mic and walked away.

Pulse, especially in the days immediately following the massacre, punctuated this disparity in experience. Well-meaning straight people, eager to make room for themselves in a grief that felt specific to queer people, sought to universalize the tragedy, as Longhurst and Hartley-Brewer had. There was much talk of “coming together” and “solidarity.” But that night, looking at the faces of the Latinx queer people who comprised the majority of the dead, people who looked like my friends and my community, I cried, feeling acutely alone.

Pulse seemed to be the result of many of America’s worst social ills, ills that would become full-on plagues following the presidential election months later. Gun violence that seemed to be spurred on by wounded, toxic masculinity; the massacre of LGBTQ+ people in a poisonous political climate; the glossing over of Latinx death; and a national media that was ill-equipped to address the root cause of it all, unwilling to be specific, to call something what it was.

Two years later, looking back at the event and everything that has happened in this country between then and now, I feel the numb ache of rage. None of the driving forces behind the Pulse tragedy have been sufficiently addressed. If anything, they’ve only gotten worse, as a cursory glance at our devastating daily news cycle can attest.

The deaths of 17 teenagers in Parkland have brought about only select local and state-level gun control measures, with dire little done at the federal level to meaningfully control our gun violence epidemic. The rising deaths of LGBTQ+ people, especially trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, have yet to elicit a response from the federal government, whose anti-queer rhetoric has only inflamed our plight. The deaths of 4,645 Puerto Ricans due to the Trump administration’s anemic response to Hurricane Maria have been swept under the rug and forgotten, with the topic failing to become a crisis in the news. ICE is rounding up brown people with extraordinary cruelty, a trans Honduran woman recently died in their custody, and national outcry has been limited to our communities.

The fear isn’t that straight white people haven’t heard us, and therefore don’t know what is happening. The fear is that they know, and that knowing has not moved them to care.

These days, to be marginalized means to be inundated by daily atrocities at a spirit-breaking pace. Violence rolls in, crashes in waves, more meteorological than human, rendering us ineffective agents in the solution. What can we do? We can die or we can tally the dead, immortalize them with rituals of grief, continue shouting into the void and pray we will be heard. The fear isn’t that straight white people haven’t heard us, and therefore don’t know what is happening. The fear is that they know, and that knowing has not moved them to care.

The same day I watched Owen Jones walk out of his interview, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a vigil. I had recently moved to New York from there, and I felt the need to be around friends I had known for a while. At the candlelit vigil in Logan Circle, I watched my friends stand with arms crossed and eyes narrowed, in grief but on alert. The events had turned us into stewards of some kind, reminded us of a neglected task to protect each other. I wondered if this was a founding instinct that gay men had distanced ourselves from over time, over accrued privilege. It made me wonder who else might be feeling that way, who had been feeling that way before Pulse ever brought it to the fore.