February 23, 2018--Occupy Tallahassee

Some are prognosticating that the gun control "movement" led by survivors of last week's shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, will be short-lived.

The odds are that they are right. 

To sustain this effort would require children now ranging in age from 14 to 18 to devote themselves to it essentially full time while still enrolled in high school or when their time soon comes to attend college or for some, as members of the ROTC, are obligated to enter the army. If their cause were taken over by a formal organizational structure run by adults it would lose most of its visceral effectiveness. 

Half of Never Again's current appeal is not just the popularity of the issues these kids are insisting be addressed in Tallahassee and Washington but the fact that this is a children's crusade. Children who in their newly-imposed maturity and youthful wisdom are so amazingly good on TV and the Internet and thus are especially viable in our social-media age.

So, as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times move on, as they soon will, it is likely to run out of visible gas. In other words, it will no longer be as compelling and deeply moving a story as it currently is. This is inevitable.

But then again, I am reminded of another movement organized and carried out by young people which popped up unexpectedly, attracted a great following among the public and in the media, and then seemingly passed from view. 

Occupy Wall Street. 

Its outward manifestation, occupying Zuccottti Park not far from the Stock Market on Wall Street, lasted just 28 days from September 17 through November 15, 2011, but its basic message lives on. Occupy itself passed from the scene but its central message is still with us and continues to deeply affect our political discourse--the relentless economic inequality that plagues our society. The disparity in the ownership of America's wealth between the top 1% and the rest of us.

Zuccotti Park is back to normal, occupied again mainly by stock traders taking a smoking break and New York City's resilient pigeon population, but we still have lively debates about economic fairness. Bernie Sanders, for example, would not have been as viable as he turned out to be if it weren't for the issues Occupy Wall Street placed before us.

And it could be, hopefully will be, also true for Never Again. I am feeling that our discourse, such as it is, about firearms will be permanently altered. These kids and millions of others vote or will vote when they are old enough and those they have already inspired (count me among those) will keep their "common sense" issues before us and will compel candidates at the state and national levels to take their views into active consideration if they want to protect their public sinecures.

If as I sense that those as rigid and craven as Marco Rubio and Donald Trump are sounding different it may be that something new and welcome is happening thanks to those inspiring young people we have this week been getting to know.

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."

February 21, 2018--Trump Running Scared

As evidence that some of the most arrogant of politicians in America are already feeling the heat being generated by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 teens were murdered a week ago, the Florida state legislature, aware that busloads of survivors of that mass shooting were on the road, heading for the capital in Tallahassee, 400 miles north, before even showing them the courtesy of a meeting, like the cowards they are, they voted overwhelmingly not even to consider, not even debate about ways to control the kinds of weapons of mass destruction the shooter used to mow down their classmates.

They exposed themselves--only cowards are afraid to talk. 

All those tough-guys (mostly men) who attend Florida legislative sessions with their openly-carried hand guns stuffed in the pants (how appropriate), sensing the potential political power these children are generating, hid in their offices during the morning and then later vacated them hours before these children arrived, after attending, earlier in the day, another funeral of one of their classmates, before these survivors arrived to share their stories and to seek the help of adults sworn on their bibles to protect them in their classrooms as gun violence in the schools turns more and more deadly, before being confronted by representatives of the youth of Florida, who they claim to represent these useless legislators voted as they did, not even having the courage to wait to talk with these constituents about gun control. 

Instead, they up and ran for cover.

Cringing behind their desks and feeling manly clutching their weapons, may bring them a sense of protection, but these students, in a campaign that is rapidly taking hold in high schools across the country are in fact a real threat to them and their undeserved prerogatives. 

These children are bringing at last a reckoning. A powerful one, one that hopefully will begin to mean "never again," one of their tag lines, knowingly or not, similar to the "never again" avowed by Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Another coward, cringing in his gilded bunker in Washington, a coward who sought and secured five phony deferments so he would not have to serve in the army during the Vietnam era, that tough-talking coward, who some call "our president," is at least willing to talk or, as he promises, listen during a meeting later today at the White House that will include some of the Stoneman-Douglas survivors.

This pretender is not prone to listen to anyone about anything must be running scared because otherwise he would be lying in bed as usual this afternoon taking an "executive break," watching Fox News while gorging himself on Big Macs. We'll see if he can sit still longer than the usual 15 minutes he is capable of concentrating.

If he thinks he can cool these kids out by inviting them to their (not his) White House, he shouldn't hold his breath because these children, many already old enough to vote, with hundreds of thousands more eligible to do so in just a few months, in November during the midterm elections, they, and not you, Mr. president will ultimately determine who sits in state legislators, houses of Congress, and, yes, even in the office you illegitimately hold.

Your directing the Attorney General to do the paper work to ban the use of "bump stocks" that turn semi-automatic, military-style weapons into automatic weapons of bloodshed is evidence of how scared you are of the power of these kids. This is begrudging acknowledgment that as rigid as you have proven to be they are bringing fear to your heart, which must be a feeling familiar as Robert Mueller's noose tightens. 

Nothing that you do will deter or distract them. They are unleashed and activated and will not be bought off by phony listening sessions or White House tours. 

They are coming for you for a reckoning and you should be scared for your political life and already shaky place in history because that is what a reckoning is--holding people like you responsible for things you are constitutionally required to do. 

It is obvious that this means nothing to you. You do not even understand your sacred constitutional role. But they do. They have been paying attention in their American history classes. 

These kids are on the move not only to take their protection into their own hands but to teach any of us who may have forgotten or, like you, never even paid attention or understood, what America means.

But you do have strong survival skills--that I'll grant you--and though you truly do not understand you are feeling sacred. 

As you should be.

February 20, 2018--Children Must Lead Us

The biblical citation, Isaiah 11:6, says, 

"The wolf . . . shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

The classmates of the very little children murdered five years ago, twenty 1st and 2nd graders in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, could not lead us. They were too young to find the words.

But the much older high school children who are the survivors of yet another school massacre, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL can--they have found their voice and are attempting to lead us. 

We will do well to follow. 

They have already begun to plan a school boycott and a massive march on Washington for March 24th, "March for Our Lives." And they have been speaking out eloquently on all our media outlets with the savvy of people much older than they. 

Their suffering is prematurely making them wise.

Here in the words of one organizer, 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez, is the heart of the matter-

All these [students and their families] should be home grieving. But instead we are up here, standing together, because if all our government and president can do is send "thoughts and prayers," then it is time for victims to be the change that we need to see.

She demanded to know where the "common sense" is in our gun laws and identified members of Congress who have accepted money and donations from the NRA.

She also directly criticized Donald Trump who tweeted a call for action on mental health, not gun controls, while criticism him for overturning an Obama-era law that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy guns.

She ended by saying that "If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was 'a terrible tragedy,' I'm going to ask him how much money he received from the NRA."

The answer is--in 2016 more than $30 million. And, while I'm at it, $3.3 million to pay-to-play Florida senator Marco Rubio, who said it's "too soon" after the shooting to talk about gun control.

And so as not to be duped by our commander-in-chief who doesn't care at all but who may be trying to find a way to horn in on the students' passion as yet another way to distract us from his failings and felonies, Parkland students are tweeting--

Morgan Williams wrote--

Oh my god. 17 Of MY CLASSMATES AND FRIENDS ARE GONE AND YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO MAKE THIS ABOUT RUSSIA???!! HAVE A DAMN HEART. You can keep all your fake and meaningless "thoughts and prayers."

Aly Sheehy tweeted--

17 of my classmates are gone. That's 17 futures, 17 children, and 17 friends stolen. But it always has to be about you. How silly of me to forget.

March 24th--mark it on your calendar--Washington, DC.