really help your healing,” Claire said. “Taking action, leading marches, getting laws changed, and really speaking out to create this change really was what helped Lauren make the transition from a victim to a thriving survivor. Anything she could do to help Jaclyn and the other students in their journey, she wanted to do.”
In the midst of all this, as they were really getting rolling late Friday, Cameron called.
3
#NeverAgain
1
Cameron Kasky first tweeted #NeverAgain on Thursday. He would delight in telling the New Yorker that the hashtag came to him on the toilet, in his Ghostbusters pajamas. Wasn’t “never again” a Holocaust phrase? his friends asked. Yes, but so what? They brushed it off and went with it and #NeverAgain was born.
Cameron’s late-night plea to “talk to me” had worked. He woke up to reams of messages, and then friends started showing up. CNN had seen his posts and asked him to write an op-ed, which they posted that day. That led to a lot of national media, including appearances on NPR and Anderson Cooper 360°. Cam and his friends went to the vigil Thursday evening and came home with more kids. Cam’s living room—technically, his mom’s; she was still making her way back from the Caribbean—would morph into the headquarters of a nascent movement.
The response had to be huge. A march on Washington—the whole country pouring into the capital to demand gun reform. A massive show of force to demonstrate the national will backing their demands. Demands—they would need some demands. They would get to that. They had to do it fast. Speed was paramount, no Newtown mistakes this time. But they had to be realistic. This couldn’t be done overnight. And they didn’t want to peak too soon.
They needed more brainpower. They issued a Twitter invitation for anyone to join. And they needed a meeting place, a virtual space, for a movement. “Working on a central space that isn’t just my personal page for all of us to come together and change this,” Cameron posted. “Stay alert. #NeverAgain.” They gave themselves a deadline, their first, to have that space created by midnight. They made it. A Facebook page: NeverAgainMSD.
They kept at it well into the night. Much more social media, Instagram accounts, Twitter, and Snapchat. They were all on some platforms already, but realized they had to maximize all channels. They helped each other create accounts and get up to speed. And they started setting down ground rules: this had to be bipartisan. That meant backtracking a bit, and a new edict: no more singling out Republicans. No endorsing any candidate, just ideas. There were a lot more Democrats on their side, but all the more reason to reach out to Republicans.
And with every post they made, the clearer it became that they needed one voice. Internally they could debate fiercely, but consensus ruled and then they had to present a united front. Contradict each other or bicker by Twitter, and the powerful gun lobby would rip them to shreds. It might anyway.
Friday came early. None of the kids could sleep much. “Good morning,” Cameron posted. “Our voices are being heard. People care. People feel the way we do. Anderson Cooper’s eyes are even more beautiful in person. More coming today, but please know—this is only the beginning for us.”
Hour by hour, his sprawling living room grew fuller. Some of the kids were active in the school’s TV news program: Ryan Deitsch and Delaney Tarr, and a smart, articulate friend of Cameron’s whom he recruited too. Emma González was a striking sight: full lips, piercing brown eyes, sparse makeup, and a shaved head. She had lopped off her hair a week or two before senior year. “People used to ask me why, and the main reason is that having hair felt terrible,” she later explained in the New York Times. “It was heavy, it made me overheated, and every time I put it up in a ponytail (and I looked terrible in a ponytail) it gave me a headache. And, it sounds stupid, but it made me insecure; I was always worried that it looked frizzy or tangled. What’s the best thing to do with an insecurity? Get rid of it. It’s liberating to shave my head every week.”
Her parents had not approved. “The more my parents said no, the more I wanted it,” she said. “Actually, I even made a PowerPoint in order to convince them that I should do it. I figured I would look really good