February 22, 2018--Code-Red Kids: 3:00 am Raw Draft

In less than a week, it's become all about our children. Everyone's children, including those of us who do not have any of our own.

These are the children of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the latest place in America where 14 children and three adults were gunned down on Valentine's Day.

These children have been ubiquitous every day since--on social media, on TV, in the press. Including last night at a town hall meeting in South Florida where calmly they skewered and dismantled their senator, Marco Rubio, as he tried to con and patronize them, attempting to wiggle out of taking responsibility for the fact that the National Rifle Association (NRA) have him on their payroll and thus own him lock, stock, and barrel (to use a weaponized idiom). 

He could only sputter when students asked him to explain and justify this. He couldn't except to say, with unintentional honesty, that they do so because they "buy his agenda." Do they ever. By bankrolling him they are assured he will do their bloody bidding. He had nothing to say when they pointed out that he received $3.3 million in campaign lucre last year, three times what any of the other hundreds in Congress who are on the NRA payroll pocketed. 

They are all of our children because they are as perfect as we imagine ours to be or would want them to be if we had any of our own. In them we see a reflection of ourselves at our imagined best, as we would like to be, hope that we are.

Self-confident, well-mannered, articulate, forceful, passionate, persistent, polite, knowledgeable, just, fair-minded, and eloquent, they invite us to grieve with them and now are calling us, if necessary shaming us, to action. 

Inviting us to support them in saving their lives since as code-red, children who every day of their school lives have lived with the real threat that today, this week, this year the code-red drills they routinely practice, where they learn to hide in the coat closet when there is an actual shooter present in their classroom, will be more than a drill but an imminent threat. 

With respect and without averting there eyes either to us, their parents, their neighbors, their teachers, their so-called leaders, including even the president in the White House, they point their fingers, while not literally doing so, asking, telling us, now that we have demonstrated we are incapable of protecting them, saving their lives and childhoods since we adults have failed at that, they are telling us that they are taking action to save their own lives, that they are taking the lead and invite us to join them. 

"Never again," they chant.

How to put this? To finesse this? 

Though it may be unflattering to acknowledge, their movement seems different because those this time calling us to action are not from working-class backgrounds or, as with Black Lives Matter, not from urban hot spots, but look and feel like they are our imagined best, especially so to the media covering their testimony and mobilization. 

As with most of the reporters and journalists covering them, they come from solidly middle-class backgrounds and, though as diverse as America is, are disproportionately white.

Sorry, in spite of our progress we are still tribal. That is still how it works, hardwired in our DNA. 

They are like the kids we have at home and send in trust to the schools. This is thus personal and as a result may be powerful enough not just to move us but perhaps even succeed in bringing about some long-needed change. 

They are a generation who have been waiting to find reasons to inspire them, to make their lives meaningful, authentic. They are bringing the lie to how they have been stereotyped--as self-indulgent Millennials.  They now have reasons to be inspired--what they have been looking for last week was brought right to their classroom door. 

And they are thus far proving up to the task.

Which in turn, in exactly a week, still bearing raw wounds, is why they wound up in the White House, invited there by President Trump, who actually, following notes written for him by others, actually found the capacity uncharacteristically to "listen." For 70 minutes at least. 

He mostly seemed to listen, and that was both appropriate and welcome, but when he spoke, after their riveting testimony, when he did turn to speak to them and us, all he could offer was to parrot NRA talking points from previous classroom massacres from Columbine, to Sandy Hook, and now to Parkland, Florida. 

What we need to do, he mouthed, is arm classroom teachers so when someone shows up bearing military weapons of mass destruction they will be able to shoot back with their handguns and thereby take control of the situation. They will be armed and prepared how to pause while teaching their current students to shoot back and kill one or more of their former classmates. All this on a teacher's salary.

The students at the White House meeting did not let him get away with this absurdity, respectfully asking if he expected a semi-trained teacher would be able to defend them from fully automatic military-style weapons with, by comparison, a pathetic handgun?

Trump had no answer but to repeat what the NRA has paid him to say. Thirty million dollars in campaign contributions for the 2016 election. 

It of course remains to be seen if these children, which some reminded us they still are, can sustain their effort. They know, as one in effect put it during last night's town hall on CNN, they are just at the beginning of a "5K" race. Though, it made me feel a wave of both emotion and optimism to see another correct him, saying, "No, some of this is a 'sprint,' so let's make it work because our lives are literally at stake."