when the final contingent from Florida State University rolled in.
Seventeen placards were positioned on easels up and down the steps, each one bearing the contents of one of seventeen bills that had failed in the last several years—failed even to be read in committee. “Seventeen bills that could have saved seventeen lives,” a mom told me, a senator told me, aides told me, and the incoming president of the Florida PTA told me. They had their talking point.
A whole lot of students had come, but they were not the majority of the crowd, not by a long shot. There were moms, so many moms, and grandmas. Dads too, but three-fourths of the crowd was female, many of them in red Moms Demand Action T-shirts. They had been fighting for this so long, they said, and many had lost hope, until they saw David Hogg on Thursday morning, the leader they had been waiting for—and then Emma called BS on Saturday, and really blew them away. The signs were all hand-painted, with phrases like am i next?; protect kids, not guns; and children shouldn’t die for your hobby. There were elaborate artworks of acrylic paint on ten-foot tarps, supported by poles along each side. One said blood on your hands, with bright red palm prints, and dripping blood. Another featured a giant blue clockface labeled next massacre countdown clock. And of course we call bs signs everywhere.
The speakers were powerful, and the mood euphoric. With the Parkland kids leading them, they were convinced they could break through this time.
But almost none of the Parkland kids were feeling that. Their introduction to their government had filled them with disillusionment. Officials had turned the rotunda over to them for most of the noon hour to address the public, via the press. Jackie had organized about a dozen kids to deliver short speeches, in quick succession.
Alfonso started slowly and graciously, thanking officials for having them, describing his life just a week earlier: his biggest worries about what show to watch at six p.m., when to do his homework, study for a math test, and fit in theater rehearsals for a show at an elementary school down the road. “We are just children,” he said. And there he took a sharp turn. “A lot of people think that that disqualifies us from even having an opinion on this sort of matter. As if because we’ve been through a traumatic experience, that we don’t know what we’re talking about and that we’re speaking irrationally. We know better than anyone. We understand what it’s like to face a gun, to lose our friends, to return to school, to look at an empty seat.” He faltered there. “And you know that that empty seat is because— Because someone’s— Because someone’s dead.” Parkland was a beautiful town he said, a safe town. “And it’s now ruined!” He packed so much revulsion into that word. Alfonso was the first Parkland kid I heard enunciate that. The Columbine kids had fought so hard to reclaim the word as the name of the school instead of an atrocity, but they had lost. When they went off to college, other kids named their high schools while they said Colorado, or Denver, or anything to avoid the pity and awkward silences.
Alfonso said he wasn’t ready to go back to school in a week. “I don’t think anybody here is ready.” He had been to grief counselors, but they needed more than counseling. “What we need is action.” The precise action—they were still working that out. But they would not be fooled by platitudes or spin. “We are old enough to understand why someone might want to discredit us for their own political purposes. Trust me, I understand. I was in a closet, locked, for four hours with people who I would consider almost family, crying and weeping on me, begging for their lives. I understand what it’s like to text my parents, ‘Goodbye. I might never, ever get to see you again. I love you.’ I understand.”
They demanded action, and were prepared to sacrifice, Alfonso said. “I am prepared to drop out of school. I am prepared to not worry about anything else besides this, because change might not come today, it might not come tomorrow, it might not even come March twenty-fourth, when we march for our lives down in Washington, but it will happen, in my lifetime, because I will fight every single day—and I know everyone here will fight for the