kind of needs people’s validation. Just being an actor and all.” He smirked. “Not a crisis actor. I like using acting and theater as a symbolism for politics, because it’s spectacle.” He admitted that you need people to like you to be effective, though. “That’s what politicians need, too. It’s just politicians acting in the real world, and never taking down their facade. For me, I don’t have that facade.” He said his brutal candor was “the best and worst part about me. People know how I feel, and if you’re an asshole, I’m going to say it.”
He smiled when he said that. He was smiling a lot now. His parents marveled at the return to serenity—bouts of it, at least. “I just think over time it kind of settled out,” he said. “The anger in this marathon, it’s like a drug. It’s good at getting things done quickly, but not in the longer term. Love and compassion and patience is the stamina you need to make long, substantial change. This is a slow burn. We started out as one spark in a field of tinder, and now we’ve really, really started to burn into the hundred-year-old oaks. That’s what we have to do. If we have to burn down the entire forest to grow a new one, without the sprouting of corruption, through voting, we’ll do it.”
Calmer, but still David. In the middle of his reflection on love and tranquility, the metaphor grabbed hold of him and burned the forest down.
He kept catching himself swearing that visit. He was trying to kick that, at least in interviews. But he still said “fuck” twenty-eight times in two hours. They were softer curses, though, without the vitriol.
The NRA was still most likely to draw a “fuck” out of David. Their five-million-members claim annoyed him. “I highly doubt that. They say they speak for the majority of gun owners. Only one in ten gun owners is actually a member. They’re a loud minority.”
MFOL was speaking for the majority, he said—though he wished his cohort would speak up on Election Days. “Whenever I talk to groups and they ask me why young people vote so little, I look at them blankly and I say it’s because they don’t give a fuck.” David said. “It’s not that hard to get out and vote.”
But he echoed Harvard’s Della Volpe on how to change that. “People need to see impact,” David said. “For somebody to cross the bridge of fear, they need to see materialization.” The real test wasn’t electing the legislators or passing the legislation, or quibbling about what constitutes “meaningful” change. Those were all means, and only the end mattered: driving down the rate of gun deaths. That was a long way off, and until they reached that threshold, it would be “like trying to prove that bigfoot doesn’t exist.”
3
Prom was the same weekend as Spring Awakening. Best chance all spring to put guns aside for one night. “Prom is really important to keep morale high,” Dylan said. “That’s a night of happiness and fun. You can’t lose sight of those things. Somebody brought up this idea of having something about the shooting at prom, and we were like, ‘That’s the worst idea you’ve ever come up with!’ Prom should be a night where they can be normal. Nobody should feel guilty about being happy. It’s something we all deserve.”
But Dylan had never been sucked into a mass shooting vortex before. They were rife with competing agendas, and the most sensitive was honoring the dead. Columbine remained closed for four months after its tragedy, until the first day of fall semester. Students felt so robbed of their school’s identity that they staged an elaborate Take Back the School rally, including a human shield of parents to block the press from witnessing it. The school consulted closely with grief counselors, who recommended that for that one day, the focus be entirely on the kids and moving forward, with just a brief gesture toward the deaths. Minutes after the kids cut the ribbon and joyously retook their school, parents of the fallen staged an impromptu press conference to berate the school for failing to properly acknowledge their loss.
Douglas High was not going to repeat that mistake. The dead were honored several ways at the prom. There was a montage of photos submitted by students, and a memorial mall just outside the main ballroom honoring the four seniors killed on Valentine’s Day—Meadow Pollack, Nicholas Dworet, Joaquin Oliver,