High schoolers in the streets
despite having our hearts ripped out of our chests. Despite losing our friends and coaches. Despite living through a nightmare. As students of Douglas, we are the voice of this generation. And I’ll be damned if anyone thinks they can silence us.
— kyra (@longlivekcx) February 18, 2018
My generation was mobilized politically by the threat of being sent to kill and die in Vietnam.
The new generation is being mobilized by the threat of being killed in their classrooms.
It would of course be foolish to assume that the political path of the new generation will follow that of the 1960s generation. There are so many differences. Here are two that seem to me to matter:
First, the draft was an institutionalized, bureaucratic mechanism that every male faced, by law, on his eighteenth birthday. A choice was forced on each young man. But school shootings are random, unpredictable.
Second, because the draft and the war it served were caused by the government, we knew whom to protest against and what had to be done. The way to end mass murders in schools isn’t as conveniently obvious. Yet there are some steps that a high school movement can and will focus on, beginning with making it harder to get a gun than to hack your parents’ Netflix account.
But those differences will not matter if this movement is indeed an expression of the outrage the high school generation feels. They are facing so much that I can’t even begin to list the issues — not that I need to since they are the issues++ that my generation faced, addressed, and in some cases made worse. Our children’s fear of being murdered in their schools is, horrifyingly, simply the identifiable face of the unfair world we are leaving them.
Hearing these young people speak out even before they have buried their friends brings me the saddest hope imaginable. At such an age to stand so strong together…they are fierce and beautiful and I will laugh and cry with joy as they change the world.
Of course I stand with them. Or, more exactly, I stand a respectful and supportive distance behind them. And not just on March 24:
http://act.everytown.org/sign/march-for-our-lives/
Here’s the speech from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez at an anti-gun rally happening today in Fort Lauderdale https://t.co/CyfMnPDAvW // https://t.co/hgewZy4Cxf https://t.co/gssAmGczuH
— Joshua Chavers (@JoshuaChavers) February 17, 2018
