(Sept. 30, 2011) — Bullying: it’s become more than just a small issue. Every day, in schools all around the world, students are harassed by their classmates. These troubled teens want nothing more than for someone to understand them, to hear them, to feel the pain they have to go through. Thankfully, the new single “Make It Stop” by Rise Against, a highly successful punk rock band from Chicago, assures them that someone is listening. Tim Mcllrath, the band’s lead singer, states that many events were the catalyst for “Make it Stop,” including the suicides during September of 2010. The song’s music video is all about showing viewers how cruel high school life can really be. It centers around the typical day of three teens singled out from their high school peers for having homosexual orientation. From the moment the music video starts, the viewer sees increasingly unwatchable scenes of what is an everyday reality for some students. It’s over dramatised just enough to probe at your heart, yet still retain its credibility. Pushed to the very brink of tolerance, the four teens in the music video come to the heart-wrenching conclusion that death is better than living through another day. Having to watch a teen commit suicide is hard enough, but to further drive home the horror of it, the music video shows images of what the teens would have grow to be as they prepare to take their own life. It was at this point that I was almost driven to tears. But hope remains, as the song’s message changes towards the very end. The last minute of the song is what I think is its heartwarming epicenter. One by one, the video cuts to YouTube videos of real teens across the country that have risen against similar situations. Each one encourage others like them that life does get better. Ultimately, their message makes a shining breakthrough as the teens in the video put down the guns, step away from the bridges and untie the nooses. “When the song says ‘make it stop,’ it’s talking to the part of society that would hide behind euphemisms like ‘family values’ to justify bigotry,” Mcllrath writes to the Huffington Post, “[and] when it says ‘let this end’ it’s addressing hate filled TV networks that masquerade as news stations.” “Let this end.” This reviewers could not agree more.