Dear friends,
I’m finding it hard to find words this week. What do we say when children practice lockdowns, when a whole city is terrorized by random bombings, when the process of growing up for our young ones seems to be increasingly a process of hardening — not hardening walls and barriers, but making cynical hearts and calculating minds as they get used to living in a random and terror-filled world? I struggle for words here. And it’s my job to be a wordsmith (among other things). This is a really hard situation. One of our local schools was dismissed early last Thursday because of a shooting threat which was, thankfully, a false alarm — but the students of Great Hills High School in Maryland were not so lucky and were faced with the actual thing. Our children and youth are learning what it is to live with the possibility of senseless and war-like terrorism at any moment.
Some of us hoped Sandy Hook would be the last one — that finally our nation would come to its senses and reform our gun laws. We’ve learned to scale back our hopes since. And we’ve too often forgotten to be outraged. But this week, let’s allow our hopes to fly high again. This week, in what’s already being called the largest student protest movement since Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of teenagers, children, and adults are expected to gather, rally, and march for gun control.
These teenagers will be voting soon… but they are using Twitter now. They are finding their political voice already and it’s time for the grownups of the nation to line up behind them and say “we’ve got your back.” And with this, a note to those who identify as grown-ups: you might not get to control this movement. The teenagers have an agenda that might strike you as overzealous. They might do something “crazy” like asking Marco Rubio to promise not to take one more cent of NRA funding*. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/a-parkland-survivor-directly-asked-marco-rubio-about-nra-donations-and-the-internet-lost-itc Not a tested tactic, not rated by polls before he tried it — he just took a stand and did it. But (1) who knows? It might work, and (2) it’s important to let the youth lead. Just like the anti-racism movement can’t be led by white people, this youth movement needs to be led by youth. So I hope you’ll come out this weekend to hear what the youth have to say, to amplify their voices and magnify their message, and to let them know we have their back. Enough is enough. Let’s do this!
Every Blessing,
Talitha
PS We are of two minds on how to handle this weekend’s marches. Some want to go to Oakland in the morning, others want to go to SF in the afternoon. I’m thinking I might do both. Thanks!