parents had lost their son or daughter. Some of the victims were adults, but they were all someone’s child. The pain was compounded by the three-month anniversary, landing just a day afterward.
Tío Manny and Patricia were bracing for it. They had a plan. “Mother’s Day is going to be an intimate moment at home,” Manny said. “We can get away by putting some food together, and not have anybody at home. Because the whole approach of people giving condolences at this point, it’s not helping, it’s only making things worse.”
It was horrible, but they got through it. The occasion that really scared them was graduation. “We don’t control what they’re planning to do,” Tío Manny said. “I assume they’re going to have emotional moments, because they always do that. They want to be good. It’s not that they do this to hurt us, but at the end of the day it does hurt us. I would rather have a graduation day where you go there and then be home in a minute.” He considered for a moment, and began to waver. “I need to be there. So I don’t know.”
6
Graduation, for so many school-shooting survivors, is the most conflicted day of their recovery. From that first day of life after “it,” graduation rises dimly on some distant horizon, painfully far and unattainable. Few kids think about it in the early days, as they console each other to “just get through it,” whatever that means. But as graduation approaches, more than any other milestone, the emotional finish line hardens into The Day: graduation from the first horrible phase. So June 3 brought a huge rush of accomplishment, a weight lifted, and for many a big FU moment to the perp. We got this!
But the pain. Meadow Pollack, Nicholas Dworet, Joaquin Oliver, and Carmen Schentrup were missing from their graduating class. That was news to no one, yet the act of eight hundred peers donning caps and gowns to celebrate, moving on to college, to life, to adulthood, without them felt almost cruel.
Graduation day was as bad as Tío Manny envisioned, but he would unleash his rage on a mural in Chicago twelve days later. At the graduation ceremony, he contained it. Tío Manny attended with his wife and daughter. When Joaquin’s name was called out, his parents came forward, and Patricia accepted his diploma. She wore a lemon yellow T-shirt emblazoned top to bottom:
THIS
SHOULD BE
MY
SON
The crowd roared, Patricia smiled, blew a kiss, and raised her open arms. Manny raised his fist.
“Some people thought that we weren’t going to show at graduation, because it was too sad,” Tío Manny said. “Yes, it is sad, but that’s not as important as sending a message. You need to take these opportunities and just change it. Flip them.”
19
Road to Change
1
Now what? The march was over, summer demanded something big. They could never top DC for national exposure, but they were focused on local networks now—expanding and energizing all the fledgling groups. It was all about direct contact: where they were needed was on the road. They had been traveling in twos and threes—what if they multiplied that? Create some sort of event status, sustained over a season. They kept brainstorming, and a two-month bus tour took shape. The entire summer vacation, essentially, from a week after graduation through the last free weekend before returning to school. They hashtagged it #RoadToChange.
So where to go? There were lots of competing ideas: swing districts, swing states, sites of previous tragedies, centers of urban violence, big population centers, cities with vibrant groups, groups crying out for help.
So they researched it heavily, and mapped out a route to hit all of them. But they all agreed that one element was critical: they had to return to gun country. Their focus was the midterms, but this was only year one; they had to look beyond November as well. They routed most of the summer’s bus tour through deep red states: Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina. “Most of the tour stops are the places where it’s most likely people disagree with us,” Jackie said. The Farm Belt, the Mountain West, and the Deep South. “We want them to show up and listen to what we have to say. They’ll bring back that conversation to other people that disagree.”
Matt Deitsch, now the group’s chief strategist, referred to those stops as “the places where the hate comes from.” He meant the hate against them. But when I called it enemy territory, he cringed.