Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  His next post lamented not thanking his teachers enough. He offered eternal thanks for all they did, and then singled one out by name: “Driscoll, if you’re reading this . . . thanks. Everything my little brother and I ever do in the future is pretty much completely because of you. We almost slipped through the cracks. We almost kept walking. We almost went right into the danger.”

  He created a Twitter account. He tried to sleep. He got up. “Can’t sleep,” he posted, again on Facebook. “Thinking about so many things. So angry that I’m not scared or nervous anymore. I’m just angry. And a little confused. Trying to get the word out and talk to people. I don’t even know what I want to say necessarily. I just want people to understand what happened and understand that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that concept was so difficult to grasp.”

  And then he did something so simple, but so vital . . . the single most significant moment of the movement. He asked for help. He gave out two more social media handles—Instagram and his new Twitter account—and asked people to message him. “I want people talking about this. I can’t let this die like all the others. I need this to be the end. Everybody needs this to be the end. Talk to me.”

  Then he got some sleep. And messages poured in.

  5

  Jaime Guttenberg, Jackie Corin’s fourteen-year-old ballerina friend, was not “missing.” She was dead. She was one of the seventeen memorialized Thursday evening at a huge candlelight vigil. Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz attended and met up with Jackie afterward. A family friend had forwarded the Facebook message, and Wasserman Schultz wanted to help. By now Jackie had ideas germinating, and her instincts were to make something happen immediately, which meant Tallahassee, not Washington. Passing something in the Florida legislature was merely implausible, not impossible. So Wasserman Schultz connected Jackie to Lauren Book, the state senator representing Parkland.

  Book was instantly on board. She encouraged Jackie to think big. They started brainstorming Friday, and began to hash out a plan. They had to act fast, because Florida was about to enter week six of a nine-week annual legislative session. “We have about ten days to craft really important legislation,” State Representative Kristin Jacobs explained a few days later. “Because it’s a whole year before the legislature comes back together, and the momentum will be completely lost.” The ticking-clock scenario could be a blessing or a curse. But the stall tactic—a cynical maneuver that had shut down every previous movement after every previous tragedy—was off the table.

  Jacobs was a Democrat and represented Parkland in the Florida House. While Jackie organized the event with Book, Jacobs was quietly working behind the scenes with Book and the Republican leadership to craft a bill. If they somehow struck a deal, the bill would go to Governor Rick Scott, a Second Amendment warrior with an A-plus NRA rating. “Honestly, I can’t see any of us going home now without something,” Jacobs said. The biggest danger was they would agree to something “so weak that it’s just a ‘Oh, we passed something,’” she said. “This is not going to be an easy lift. This is going to be Democrats on one side not liking it and Republicans on the other side not liking it and a whole bunch of us in the middle dragging them in. It’s a very delicate environment right now.”

  Jackie was only vaguely aware of the particulars, but she could feel a tipping point. “I just wanted to do it immediately,” she said. “Because I knew that the news forgets. Very quickly. And if we were all talk and no action, people wouldn’t take us as seriously.” They could not wait a month, as with the big push too long after Newtown.

  Jackie first visualized waves of students descending on the capitol from schools around the state. She put the word out, and messages came pouring in from lots of schools eager to get on board, but the organizational hurdles were overwhelming. “So I brought it down to one hundred Douglas kids, and even that was just very difficult,” she said a week later. “I couldn’t even imagine what my original idea would have taken.” Tallahassee was at the north edge of the state, 450 miles away. She had to charter buses, transport, feed, house, and chaperone a hundred minors for . . . how many days? Two? It would definitely take two days. And they had to convince top state officials to meet with them, or what was the point?

  State Senator Book set her staff in motion, especially Claire VanSusteren, a senior aide. The three of them worked through the details all weekend. It was intimidating at first. “I was terrified,” Jackie said. “I’m a seventeen-year-old calling a Florida state senator. That’s just not normal.” But she got over her skittishness pretty quickly. “You have to remember that every single person we talk to is also a human, and we all have families, and we all have emotions. I just forget that sometimes. I got so lucky with them. I call them my fairy godmothers.”

  State Senator Book worked the phones, cajoling her colleagues. As the yeses grew, the logistical concerns multiplied. Jackie had pictured a town hall format in a big chamber, but the unexpected response opened fresh possibilities. “Claire was like, ‘We were going to have dozens of meetings,’ and I was like, ‘What? That’s a lot.’”

  But Jackie came to love the plan. She had asked for volunteers by text and social media, and was getting flooded with yeses of her own. She hit her hundred max quickly, and it was tempting to keep expanding, but Jackie wanted buses rolling by Tuesday. The logistics were daunting already. So Jackie sorted the hundred into ten groups, which would rotate around the capitol throughout the day, meeting officials in intimate sessions. Senator Book compiled a profile on each official, which Jackie matched to students based on interests and personalities—“Strong students with hardheaded legislators,” she said.

  Housing changed a couple of times. Could the kids sleep on the floor? Of course, Jackie said. “At one point we were supposed to sleep in the Senate building on the twenty-second floor,” she said. “That was the plan.” But then Florida State University offered space in an office building nearby: two big rooms, one for girls and one for boys. Jackie put the word out to bring sleeping bags and air mattresses, and very little else.

  Claire handled all sorts of things Jackie would never have considered, including two permission forms that every parent had to sign. Local and national media were getting on board fast, so they allotted several slots on the buses for media to ride along. Those slots were gone by Sunday, so the rest of us planned to caravan behind.

  Funding fell into place too. Uber Eats donated lunch, and private individuals covered two dinners and breakfast. Senator Book insisted on paying the $12,000 to rent the three jumbo coach buses—not out of campaign funds but personally. She had survived sexual abuse beginning at age eleven, and her fight for victims’ rights drove her entry into politics. She saw a younger version of herself in Jackie.

  “Lauren [Book] understood how taking action in the wake of something so traumatic can really help your healing,” Claire said. “Taking action, leading marches, getting laws changed, and really speaking out to create this change really was what helped Lauren make the transition from a victim to a thriving survivor. Anything she could do to help Jaclyn and the other students in their journey, she wanted to do.”

  In the midst of all this, as they were really getting rolling late Friday, Cameron called.

  3

  #NeverAgain

  1

  Cameron Kasky first tweeted #NeverAgain on Thursday. He would delight in telling the New Yorker that the hashtag came to him on the toilet, in his Ghostbusters pajamas. Wasn’t “never again” a Holocaust phrase? his friends asked. Yes, but so what? They brushed it off and went with it and #NeverAgain was born.

  Cameron’s late-night plea to “talk to me” had worked. He woke up to reams of messages, and then friends started showing up. CNN had seen his posts and asked him to write an op-ed, which they posted that day. That led to a lot of national media, including appearances on NPR and Anderson Cooper 360°. Cam and his friends went to the vigil Thursday evening and came home with more kids
. Cam’s living room—technically, his mom’s; she was still making her way back from the Caribbean—would morph into the headquarters of a nascent movement.

  The response had to be huge. A march on Washington—the whole country pouring into the capital to demand gun reform. A massive show of force to demonstrate the national will backing their demands. Demands—they would need some demands. They would get to that. They had to do it fast. Speed was paramount, no Newtown mistakes this time. But they had to be realistic. This couldn’t be done overnight. And they didn’t want to peak too soon.

  They needed more brainpower. They issued a Twitter invitation for anyone to join. And they needed a meeting place, a virtual space, for a movement. “Working on a central space that isn’t just my personal page for all of us to come together and change this,” Cameron posted. “Stay alert. #NeverAgain.” They gave themselves a deadline, their first, to have that space created by midnight. They made it. A Facebook page: NeverAgainMSD.

  They kept at it well into the night. Much more social media, Instagram accounts, Twitter, and Snapchat. They were all on some platforms already, but realized they had to maximize all channels. They helped each other create accounts and get up to speed. And they started setting down ground rules: this had to be bipartisan. That meant backtracking a bit, and a new edict: no more singling out Republicans. No endorsing any candidate, just ideas. There were a lot more Democrats on their side, but all the more reason to reach out to Republicans.

  And with every post they made, the clearer it became that they needed one voice. Internally they could debate fiercely, but consensus ruled and then they had to present a united front. Contradict each other or bicker by Twitter, and the powerful gun lobby would rip them to shreds. It might anyway.

  Friday came early. None of the kids could sleep much. “Good morning,” Cameron posted. “Our voices are being heard. People care. People feel the way we do. Anderson Cooper’s eyes are even more beautiful in person. More coming today, but please know—this is only the beginning for us.”

  Hour by hour, his sprawling living room grew fuller. Some of the kids were active in the school’s TV news program: Ryan Deitsch and Delaney Tarr, and a smart, articulate friend of Cameron’s whom he recruited too. Emma González was a striking sight: full lips, piercing brown eyes, sparse makeup, and a shaved head. She had lopped off her hair a week or two before senior year. “People used to ask me why, and the main reason is that having hair felt terrible,” she later explained in the New York Times. “It was heavy, it made me overheated, and every time I put it up in a ponytail (and I looked terrible in a ponytail) it gave me a headache. And, it sounds stupid, but it made me insecure; I was always worried that it looked frizzy or tangled. What’s the best thing to do with an insecurity? Get rid of it. It’s liberating to shave my head every week.”

  Her parents had not approved. “The more my parents said no, the more I wanted it,” she said. “Actually, I even made a PowerPoint in order to convince them that I should do it. I figured I would look really good with it, and I do.”

  Cameron had no idea what an impact Emma González would have.

  “For me, it started with Emma,” David wrote in his memoir. “She was friends with this kid from the drama department named Cameron Kasky.” David knew him just slightly, from a single class in common, though he had noticed Cameron’s “sly, kind of edgy sense of humor.”

  “Emma was the link that brought us together,” David wrote. She coaxed him to Cameron’s house on Friday, and his first impression was, “Wow, these guys are extroverted.” A house run amok with right brains. So many talented creatives, but who did they know with a knack for getting stuff done? They needed an implementer. They needed a Jackie Corin. Cameron called her.

  “It was so late,” Jackie said. It was nine thirty. “My bedtime is usually so early, I go to bed at like eight o’clock.” But she couldn’t sleep, so she came right over. Cameron laid out his plan. “Then I told him I was taking kids to Tallahassee,” Jackie said. “He was like, ‘You’re taking kids to Tallahassee?’” She thought that’s why he had brought her in. He was incredulous. “He was like, ‘I just thought you’d be perfect for this,’” she said. “The things we were working on just collided perfectly.”

  2

  A march on Washington: What would that entail? What would it cost? Most of the core team was assembled now: Cameron, Jackie, David, and Emma, plus Alex Wind, Delaney Tarr, Ryan Deitsch, Alfonso Calderon, and several more. They brainstormed, and researched. The Women’s March on Washington the previous January provided an upper-end template. It had drawn nearly half a million people to the capital, but the real story had been the sister marches. A detailed academic analysis of 653 reported sister marches around the nation estimated a grand total of 3.3 to 5.2 million participants, with a “best guess” of 4.2 million. That translates to 1.3 percent of the population and would make it the largest single-day demonstration in recorded US history. So that was the top end. The Women’s March had set a fund-raising goal of $2 million, with big-ticket line items for bus parking, outside security, and a massive supply of Porta Potties. They didn’t quite make it. Eleven days out, they were at only $849,000, but a huge rush of money poured in in the final week. On march day, they stood at $1.8 million, ten percent short, but the march was an unqualified success.

  Two million seemed ambitious. One? A million dollars seemed audacious for a tiny group of high school students. But attempting this on the cheap and putting on a massive fiasco would reinforce the stereotype the Right was throwing at them: that these were children, in way over their heads.

  A million it was. They would announce it on the morning shows, and try not to flinch.

  How soon? Five weeks seemed like the sweet spot: potentially doable, but such a mobilization that the organizing would create its own story, and provide a month-plus metanarrative to sustain the interest they had already established. They would convert the narrative of angry kids to one of proactive kids, taking control of their destiny. And if it did get huge, it could jump-start . . . whatever they came up with next. They would start working on that highway once they built the on-ramp.

  Still, five weeks. It felt borderline reckless, but it had to be. They set the date, March 24, and a name that captured what they were feeling: the March for Our Lives.

  3

  Saturday came early. Still more kids, but most of the team was assembled now: nearly two dozen MSD students, and five recent graduates, who had been close to them in drama club. They were good friends from high school—a little older, a little wiser, and had some distance from the horror, which could be a good thing. Two of them were film students, and another one was in communications; they were going to need those skills. And Pippy—legally Kaylyn Pipitone, but nobody called her that—was a born mom, and man, could they use one of those right now. They all had moms, but moms didn’t always understand. Amazing to have a make-believe mom, who was one of them. “I was the mom when I was in drama club too,” Pippy said. “I just took everyone under my wing.” Eventually the group would be open about the recent grads, but in the early days, they had them keep a low profile. They were getting pummeled by attacks alleging that they were pawns of adults, agitators, and the Democratic Party, which must be helping them behind the scenes. Their childhood friends who had gone to school and collaborated with them the past two years hardly qualified, but it was a touchy subject.

  It was a big group for a living room, but what a living room. Like most of the other kids, Cam lived in a gated community, lush with palm trees and succulents nestled around a web of inland waterways and a pond with a waterspout. The living room featured a grand piano and walls of windows that seamlessly blended the indoor/outdoor living spaces out to the pool. A tiny little finger of the Everglades stretched right up to the edge of his lawn. Frogs, marsh rabbits, and whitetail deer roamed the area, along with an occasional great egret or alligator. “Parkland was just the most stereotypical white suburban, rich, perfect place,�
� Alfonso said. Parkland’s median income topped $130,000, double the national average, with the median home price nearly triple, at around $600,000. It had tiny pockets of poverty, just 3.5 percent of its population below the poverty line, and 19 percent of its students eligible for free lunches. The wealth was visible in the big houses and in the small details. The Porta Potties for the spontaneous memorials in Pine Trails Park didn’t smell. They were spotless, odorless, and plentiful, and the basins gleamed. Outside, there were two handwashing stations, double sided, for a total of four sinks, with full soap dispensers and pristine bottles of hand sanitizer too. There were water bottles everywhere, pallets of them, free for the taking.

  Parkland is a pastoral four-stoplight community that most of South Florida had never heard of. It hugs the Everglades, fifty miles north of Miami, on the periphery of the metro area. A chain-link fence along the edge of town marks the border of the Everglades preservation area, but that’s a political distinction—technically, scientifically, the town sits atop the Everglades, its homes on a series of tiny peninsulas constructed along its edge.

  For several thousand years, Parkland gurgled within the Everglades, which the writer and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas famously called Florida’s River of Grass. But twentieth-century developers were busily draining the wetlands to “reclaim” new tracts for sugarcane farms and housing divisions, aided by the Army Corps of Engineers. Stoneman Douglas began fighting to preserve the wetlands in the 1920s, when they were Florida’s only fresh water source. But it was her landmark 1947 book that woke the public to a coming crisis, with the Everglades on a trajectory toward extinction—wiping out a vital, complex ecosystem, and threatening the drinking water of the millions of new residents flooding in. The battle raged for decades, but when the dust settled, Stoneman Douglas was hailed as a visionary who averted ecological catastrophe. But she couldn’t stop the creation of Parkland.