Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,76

little starstruck. They chatted up the boys and then thanked them for protecting their kids. They were scared for their kids. Then they sheepishly asked for a selfie. Daniel and Ryan posed for several, then ran on. They were too excited to walk.

One of the cops called after them to hashtag it on #USCP.

Daniel looked back to make sure the cops were out of earshot, then chuckled to Ryan. “He thinks we still use Facebook.” But he was excited to be asked. And they could hardly believe this doc crew wanted to feature them. The working title was “We Are Kids.” They had been on the fringe of the spotlight for five weeks now, but it had never settled on them. Two hours later, they were still giggling over George and Amal. Not just hanging out together—they got separated toward the end, and the Clooneys made a point to come find them to say goodbye.

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Lefties fear the worst. The turnout was huge. The academic team behind the Crowd Counting Consortium put their best guess at 470,000 attending the march in Washington, and 1.4 to 2.1 million people at 763 locations nationwide, plus 84 uncounted marches abroad. That made it the third-largest protest day since Trump’s inauguration, behind the two women’s marches. “That is in comparison with some of the largest marches ever seen in the United States, an extraordinary period of national political mobilization,” it said. For comparison, the historic 1963 civil rights March on Washington drew about a quarter million. Prior to the Trump era, the Washington Post identified the largest demonstrations in US history as the protest to the US invasion of Iraq, and the Vietnam War Moratoriums in 1969 and 1970. They drew about one million and two million nationwide, respectively. That would put MFOL as the third- or more likely fourth-largest demonstration in national history. And it was the first big one organized by high school kids.

The kids were targeting the youth vote but connecting with a much broader demographic. A university team conducted detailed crowd composition surveys of all the major Trump-era protests. They published their MFOL findings in the Washington Post. Only 10 percent of attendees were under eighteen, and the average age of the remainder was about forty-nine—older than at recent rallies. They were highly educated and highly female: 72 percent college graduates and 70 percent women. (Women composed 85 percent of the Women’s March.) The kids seemed to reach their other main target audience: unengaged voters on the sidelines. Over a quarter of the marchers were attending the first protest of their lives.

And The Trace’s data had previously shown the kids kept gun safety alive with 2 percent of all news stories for a solid month, spiking to 5 percent for the first walkout. It hit 9 percent the day of the march. No other tragedy, not even Newtown, not even Columbine, had accomplished anything near that.

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They had set an audacious goal, and surpassed it in five weeks. Now what? The horizon always looks different at the summit. No predicting how it would feel.

The mood all morning was electric—with an undercurrent of reverie. Even the kids exuded it. Hour by hour, you could see their bodies relax, feel them exhaling the calm. Of course. They had to catch their breath. They envisioned this march as the birth of their movement, not the climax, but it was sure feeling like a curtain call. The press tents, that’s where you could really feel that. Row after row of frenetic fingers clacking along the keyboards, shaping the movement’s swan song.

The kids were dreaming even bigger now, but would they be rallying in obscurity? Reporters were using the last of their Wi-Fi to put a big bow on this story. Would anything bring the press back?

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PTSD

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Some of the kids were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Technically, they didn’t qualify for the diagnosis until a month after the shooting. For the first thirty days, a severe trauma reaction is classified as acute stress disorder (ASD), not PTSD. The condition is marked by symptoms like prolonged distress; problems with sleep, concentration, or memory; an inability to experience positive emotions; hypervigilance; a dissociation from reality; and recurrent dreams or memories. ASD is diagnosed in trauma survivors experiencing distressing symptoms and a marked impairment in the ability to function. PTSD is essentially the persistence of ASD beyond one month.

About 6 to 12 percent of survivors suffer ASD after an industrial accident, 10 percent from a severe burn, and 13