by Laura Ingraham for some college rejections in March, got the same acceptance message.
They also got the chance to give some awards. Alfonso got to present a Courage Award to ChicagoStrong, which included the Peace Warriors and BRAVE and most of their comrades there. “I think those kids in Chicago are bigger heroes than we are,” Alfonso said. “And it meant more to me than almost anything I’ve done to justify to them that what they’re doing is important. What they’re doing is really big.”
4
As they took a breath for the holidays, the kids gazed back on that crazy year. With just a whiff of hindsight, it was the road they harkened back to most. The Road to Change. And all that summer, as they rumbled across America, right about the time that night’s town hall was beginning, Bruce Springsteen was taking a Broadway stage. He regaled his audience with guitar and harmonica, but mostly with spoken stories of his lifetime traveling those same dreamy highways, in beat-up cars, borrowed pickups, and endless rowdy tour buses—out of Freehold, New Jersey, and all the way back again—realizing his dream to “collide with the times.” Bruce spun his story chronologically, and each night it climaxed as he reached the present, about four minutes to ten. The stories were deeply personal, but he made an exception there, squeezing in one topical incident, a late addition to the tightly scripted show. He lamented the bleakness of the Trump years, and how it shook his faith in our future, until a sunny day in March, when a group of kids from Parkland, victims refusing victimhood, drew hundreds of thousands of soul mates to our capital, to remind America what we stand for. What we are capable of. The March for Our Lives Day, he called it. A day that changed America. A day that changed him. He described it so vividly, experiencing it from a distance, the sights and sounds invigorating him through his TV, the faith flowing back into him, the wonder restored. The dream of life. The rising. “It was a good day,” he said. “A necessary day.” And just like Jackie Corin, a young woman he has yet to meet, Bruce reached back fifty years, and drew a straight line to Martin Luther King Jr., assuring us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—but adding a stern corollary: “That arc doesn’t bend on its own.” Bending it takes a whole lot of us, bending in with every ounce of strength we’ve got.
And right about then, in a church or gym in Bismarck or El Paso, another town hall was wrapping up, and Jackie and Cameron, Delaney, Dylan, Daniel and Brendan, Bradley, Jammal, John, Pippy, Adam, Amaya, Annabel, Sarah, Sofie, Alex, Alfonso, Samantha, Matt and Ryan, Morgan, Sheryl, Lex, Chris, Carly, Charlie, Michelle, Kyrah, Kevin, Naomi, Robert, Gabriel, Diego, David, Lauren, and Emma, and whatever freedom riders hitched a ride that week, were bending in. They would stagger to some strange bed, wake weary, bleary, a bit confused about where their pillows lie, but certain, absolutely certain, of one thing: that to their cause—to save every kid of every color from the ravages of gun violence—history will bend.
Time to stuff their suitcases, board the Bus to Somewhere, recharge each other with road giggles, and exhale that hope and wonder into another American town.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I want to thank all the survivors who shared their stories and their lives, taking me into their confidence, their offices, and many of their homes. I won’t rename everyone in the story, but this is your story, and thanks for trusting me with it. Equal thanks to all the MFOL team mentioned only in passing or not at all. I’m sorry our paths didn’t cross, or came too late. (Charlie Mirsky, can’t wait to meet you!) Also their parents, especially Tío Manny and Patricia Oliver, Rebecca Boldrick and Kevin Hogg, Natalie Weiss, and Paul and Mary Corin. Equal thanks to all the MSD students, family, and Parkland residents who helped me understand their community, especially Carol Chenkin, Wendy Hunter, and Christine Barclay, all your staff, and the casts of Spring Awakening and Legally Blonde. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, that talk-back and your story of adapting Spring Awakening was a master class for me. Your musical helped me step out of this madness I’ve been immersed in for two decades and see it with new eyes. I listened to the