Spirited activists on camera, joyless teenagers off
FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING
PARKLAND, Fla. — After a gunman turned their high school into a sprawling crime scene last week, three freshman friends leapt into the student movement for tougher gun laws. They rode a bus to the state Capitol and chased down lawmakers. They vowed to march on Washington. They shouted and waved signs saying “Protect Kids” and “Stop Killing the Future.”
But at night, in the blackness that recalls the dark classroom where she hid as a gunman murdered her classmates, Samara Barrack, 15, cannot stop thinking about that afternoon, when she fled through a blood-covered hallway. Samantha Deitsch, also 15, grieves a friend from journalism class. Aria Siccone, 14, who walked past the bodies of students from her last-period study hall, feels nothing sometimes. Just numbness.
“I keep having flashbacks,” Samara said. “There’s times I want to cry and can’t. There’s times I want to have fun and am hysterical.”
This is the reality that confronts students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the cameras turn off and the day’s rallies are over. They have won praise for their strength and eloquence on the world’s stage. But even as they raise millions of dollars and plan nationwide rallies, parse the details of assault-weapons laws and spar with politicians and conservative critics, the young survivors of the massacre are struggling with the loss of their friends and educators and the nightmares that flood back in moments of stillness.
And Parkland, once named Florida’s safest city by a home-security group, is today a place carved open by rage, grief and questions about whether any child, anywhere, can ever be safe from a spray of bullets.
It is a place where friends now attend counseling together, where parents worry how their children will head to campus when classes resume Wednesday. It is a place where strangers hug one another in a memorial park that bears crosses and Stars of David for the 17 victims, where others break down as they lay flowers at the fence surrounding MSD, as the school is known.
“It’s ripped the rug out because we’re such a close-knit community,” Parkland Mayor Christine Hunschofsky said.
The Spanish-tiled houses and fairway-view homes of subdivisions named Heron Bay and Water’s Edge are filled with families who chose Parkland for its schools and safety. It draws families from Florida and beyond, and the parental contact lists for school groups are filled with area codes from Boston, New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia. Children ride their bikes to community pools and grow up listening to alligators chortle at night. The Parkland bubble, people call it.
“It’s beautiful and brand-new and has been since I’ve gotten here,” said Sara Giovanello, a senior whose family moved from Long Island, N.Y., when she was 9. “I feel like they’re building something more every day.”
And to teachers and parents, Stoneman Douglas High School, with its rank of 50th in the state by U.S. News and World Report and its 94 percent graduation rate, was its crown jewel. It is a vast campus of 3,000 students whose schedules overflow with extracurricular activities: sports, speech, drama, literary clubs, a gay-straight alliance, poetry slams, television production, a marching band and more.
Caitlyn Rosenblatt, 16, who grew up here, put it like this: “The day I was born, my parents knew I was going to Stoneman Douglas.”
Before the shooting, arguments over gun control were hashed out in debate classes. Meditations on isolation and death were composed for speech tournaments. A congressman who represents the heavily Democratic area addressed students at the invitation of the politics club. Student mental-health issues were discussed in The Eagle Eye, the school newspaper.
Now, as students brace themselves to return to classes this week, evenings at friends’ houses have turned into organizing meetings. Group phone chats that once revolved around physics problems and AP literature sonnets are now filled with plans for rallies, vigils and news about legislation and gun politics. Their personal social media accounts are now hugely popular springboards for action, such as the student journalist David Hogg’s call for a boycott of Florida’s spring break season if lawmakers do not tighten gun laws.
Students said activism has helped them grieve and wrought some purpose from the senseless killings of their friends. Ashley Turner, a senior, made plans to donate blood and said she thought enduring all of this would make her stronger.
But she still wakes in the middle of the night, her heart pounding, her body beaded with sweat.
“I attended five funerals,” she said. “There are times where I just want to cry. There are times when I feel nothing. There are times where I feel angry and just want to snap at people.”
Jack Haimowitz, 18, now rarely falls asleep before 1 a.m., so every night, he chooses three friends from his phone contacts and calls to check in. Are you eating? Are you OK? Some scroll through their phones for hours, scared to sleep, Jack said. Others feel helpless or cry when he calls.