fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures.
They were most influenced by principle number 3: “Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.” Gun violence is the enemy, legislators blocking solutions were a problem, and those legislators were adversaries, not enemies—and that was a clear distinction, not just a grammatical point. Even if they had been corrupted by NRA money, none of those people were evil, and none of them deserved to be treated as if they were.
The Parkland kids loved the spirit of the principles and their practical implications even more. Politics in America had grown deeply polarized and personal, and that was benefitting no one. It sure as hell hadn’t led to sensible gun laws. Demonizing your adversaries just sealed off ears. Right about that time, David Hogg identified the hardest part of their fight: “People mishearing what we’re trying to say. Like, do we want an assault weapons ban? Yeah, we do, but, we don’t want to take the Second Amendment away. We want responsible owners to be able to own guns. A lot of people have said that we’re like Nazis trying to take their guns and stuff—we fucking aren’t. We’re kids that are trying to save lives, and put reasonable gun legislation in place, where if you’re a mentally unstable individual or somebody with a criminal history, you can’t get a gun. And if you’re a criminal, we’re gonna come after your guns. I think we all can agree on that. But it’s these fringe arguments that so many of these people push that become the issue.”
David Hogg struggled with principle number 3 more than anyone on the team. He was a born debater, with a short fuse. He slipped past the boundaries frequently, but it helped to have a team drawing him back.
Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all. America was listening, eager to do something, supposedly, and turning to these teenagers to be led.
About a week after the powwow at Emma’s, Father Pfleger flew the Parkland kids up north for more meetings, adding a group of young Latino activists from the gritty Brighton Park neighborhood, and white kids from the North Side. “We kind of put together this black, white, brown, West Side, South Side, North Side group,” Father Pfleger said. “They’re very different, you know. The Parkland kids are afraid in school; our kids are afraid to go to and from school.” They all spent the day together, and walked the neighborhood, to get a sense of where they lived and how they lived. That sparked much deeper conversations than they’d had at Emma’s house—about how they felt about those conditions, and what they had done to try and change them. The Parkland kids loved that: fresh perspectives and fresh inspiration. They were a few weeks into this struggle—the Chicago kids had been born into it.
Chicago is battling a gun violence epidemic, but it’s generally seen by outsiders—even in affluent areas of Chicagoland—as a South Side problem. The Peace Warriors lived on the West Side. So did the Latino kids from Brighton Park. Each neighborhood was unique, with varying cultures and systemic hurdles. Individualized projects work best, but organizers are much more effective working together. The Parkland powwows actually helped solidify local ties. “We’ve had several meetings trying to build this coalition here in Chicago,” Father Pfleger would say a few months later. But the real goal was a unified coalition across the country, especially one uniting cities and suburbs. “So it’s not just Chicago doing their thing, Parkland doing their thing,” Father Pfleger said. “How do we begin to connect these dots and unite the youth around America?”
The biggest hurdle was getting white America to reengage with the inner cities and try to help them out. It wasn’t a lack of caring; more a lack of hope. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and most of my family is there. I return regularly, and I rarely encounter people who are OK with the devastation going on nearby. Just as rare, though, are people doing anything significant to help. The problem seems too overwhelming and too intractable. We don’t really