San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Leading the way
Despite their grief ... the Parkland kids began effective, intricate organizing efforts to change laws in Florida, and then around the country.
“Americans respond to most mass shootings with shock and grief,” David Cullen writes in “Parkland,” but “Columbine and Parkland provoked fear.” It took Cullen 10 difficult years to write “Columbine,” his authoritative account of “the first school massacre of the cell phone era.” In that book, he presented an account of killers and victims, with especial attention to dispelling the web of myths as to why the two shooters went to their Colorado high school on April 20, 1999, to perpetrate what they hoped to be the deadliest attack of this kind in the country’s history. In about 45 minutes, they killed 13 and wounded 23 before killing themselves. Cullen’s research took him deep into this tragedy, and he developed PTSD symptoms as a result. He vowed never again to immerse himself in that kind of calamity.
But after the shooting at Florida’s Parkland high school on Valentine’s Day 2017, Cullen found himself drawn to the scene of the crime. Or rather, he was drawn to the high school students who, having survived that attack, turned their shock and grief into a political movement that may yet change the deeply dysfunctional ways in which the United States deals with gun violence. Post-traumatic political action.
The devastating six minutes of shooting at Parkland (17 killed) recalled Columbine and the awful 11-minute massacre of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary (26 killed). No school, we were reminded, is safe. But it wasn’t fear that got Cullen’s attention. It was the indomitable will of a group of teenagers to turn their tragedy into fuel for a political movement that would push back against the National Rifle Association’s stranglehold on American politics and create a path for legislation for gun safety.
The Parkland kids, as they came to be called, had had enough of the generic expressions of sympathy, the sharing of thoughts and prayers. They had been through hellish fear and had lost dear friends; now they took on the task of preventing anything like this from happening again. A core group of would-be activists came together remarkably quickly — the first calls to action took place only eight hours after the shooting. Despite their grief, the worries of their parents and the admonitions of skeptical grownups who claimed to know better about how things work in the public sphere, the Parkland kids began effective, intricate organizing efforts to change laws in Florida, and then around the country.
First using the hashtag #NeverAgain, they eventually settled on March for Our Lives as the name for their coalition demanding rational gun safety laws. “They could not rewrite Valentine’s Day, but they could reframe it,” Cullen explains. Rejecting the repetition of trauma, they could fight for political change.
Reading Cullen’s account of long meetings on the logistics of transportation to the state capital, or getting people fed, or making appointments with state legislators, or coordinating local activists for protests in Washington, I occasionally shook my head, remembering that these are children. Most were too young to vote; they couldn’t check into hotel
rooms ... they needed chaperones! Yet they organized buses to Tallahassee, choreographed media appearances and even had some success when thenGov. Rick Scott defied the NRA and backed regulations on bump stocks, which enable a semiautomatic weapon to fire more bullets faster.
The gun lobbyists at first just hoped the kids would go away; after all, there had been other shootings, and Americans tend to have very limited attention spans. But eventually the NRA dispatched its smooth spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, schooled at appearing compassionate while insinuating that restricting gun access endangers all our other freedoms. Others would viciously attack the youngsters as tools of the liberal establishment and far worse. In one of the many moments that went viral, Parkland kids pushed back, bypassing the NRA’s Loesch to embarrass, shame really, Sen. Marco Rubio. When challenged to no longer accept NRA money, the senator just looked lost.
Cullen provides nuanced, sensitive portraits of the Parkland kids who have become media stars, like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez. David, we are told, “had media in his blood” — he was uncannily adept at delivering succinct, memorable rhetoric around which people could rally and energetically organize. He’s also a big brother worried about his kid sister’s traumatization and his own elevation as a leader in a group that tried to function as a collective. Emma stunned everyone with her ability to reach the hearts and minds of her audience. Early on, she “called BS” on our complacency about gun safety, and it lit up social media. In the extraordinary March for Our Lives in Washington in the spring of 2018, she transfixed the nation as she movingly bore witness to the tragedy with silent, tearstained gravitas.
And these are kids! Cullen shows them also dealing with the stuff that high schoolers deal with. Grades, college applications, school plays, the jealousies of other students. Cullen even takes readers to the Parkland prom, at which there is both a determination to acknowledge those whose lives were cut short and a determination not to stop living one’s own life.
These are extraordinary young people, and Cullen does them and us a great service by showing their ordinary lives. One minute they are goofing around in a dining hall, and the next moment “they are among the most inspirational leaders in the world today.”
Can youngsters like these save us from the stalemated politics that perpetuate violence and social injustice? Although the struggle will be long, after reading “Parkland,” I wouldn’t bet against them.