by Dave Cullen
A large press area was set up stage right to maximize coverage. In addition to two special access areas—the interview tent and a riser for cameras—there was a large roaming area with an assortment of views, extra monitors, and speakers, and a filing tent set up like a makeshift office, with monitors so you could watch the event and file a story without ever peeking outside. They had high-speed Wi-Fi, but forgot to post the password, and it remained a mystery for much of the morning.
My biggest surprise in the press area was a nervous young girl with braces, oversize glasses, and a long brown ponytail. She was one of us, though. A reporter’s notebook protruded from her puffy black winter jacket, and the 35 millimeter Cannon camera around her neck looked heavy enough to topple her over. It had telephoto lenses two to three times the length of her slim fingers. Half the pink polish was worn from her nails.
I introduced myself. My hand swallowed hers, but her shake was firm, voice confident. She was Julia Walker, reporting for the Viking Saga at East Lyme High School in Connecticut. Credentialing had been crazy, I said. How did she manage, when did she start?
“Well, today I was in the crowd and I looked in my camera bag and I found a press pass,” Julia said. She dug it out: just a beat-up laminated green card stamped press pass. It said “Go Vikes!” beneath a Norse logo, and it named the school and the paper, but not her. But she was getting ahead of herself. When she first saw the media area, she had tried to coax the guard with moxie alone. “They said, ‘No, you’re not allowed to come in.’” she said. “But I looked and I found this and I thought, ‘This might work.’ And then they let me in.”
I was amazed. Julia was a sophomore, but could easily pass for middle school. It was her first year writing for the Viking Saga, and she had never operated a camera like that before, but her teacher offered to lend it, and when would she get a chance like this?
“I came here with my mom because we wanted to march, but also because as a journalist I feel like it’s important to spread awareness about everything happening,” she said. “I mean, no one should be scared to go to school every day. And it’s very inspiring. I feel like this will be in history.”
She was missing her mom right now, thinking about going back to find her. I offered to sneak her into the interview tent instead. Her eyes widened. Could I do that? I explained the goofy system they had rigged, pasting a tiny red dot to my badge for interview access, red for the riser, but they were barely noticeable, and the guard was mainly going by face. Just stick close, avoid eye contact, and move with a purpose, I said. If anyone asks, you’re with me.
She looked terrified but exhilarated. I said we should head over early and brainstorm some questions, did she want help? Of course, she said. But as I nodded toward the tent, I noticed activity. “They’re early,” I said. “Let’s go!”
She froze there, on the verge of tears. “I don’t have any questions!”
“That’s OK,” I said. I didn’t have mine ready either. “Come on!”
I nodded at the guard, he opened the gate, and she whisked in behind me without eye contact or incident. She was an unexpected asset, because I’m terrible with names and hadn’t met some of the MFOL kids, and she seemed to know them all by sight. She gasped as each one entered, and whispered their names. Sometimes she was overcome, and shouted: “That’s Delaney Tarr!”
The kids came through fast, and the goofy system the PR team had organized disintegrated immediately. They had taped a piece of letter paper with each media outlet’s name on the concrete floor, which grew invisible beneath us once the tent filled. They made two rows, with cameras in front to get the shots and reporters behind to ask questions. But many of the kids had not been briefed, and answered the camera operators’ questions along the front line and moved on. We started jostling up to the front to get to them, and I lost Julia briefly in the chaos. I spotted her panicking, waved her over, and nudged her to jump in with a question.
“How are you coming up with them?” she whispered.
“Just wing it. What have you been wondering?”
Julia was starting to scribble some ideas when Emma González bounced in. She chatted effortlessly with reporters while mouthing the lyrics to the song pulsing in. A distraught PR person felt the surge around Emma, and the gravitational thrust of everybody in that direction, and suddenly took control. “Organize yourself into small groups!” she ordered, which was a welcome idea, and we quickly grouped up. I landed with three other reporters—lost Julia again—and the PR person allotted us three minutes. As we squeezed in, Emma was finishing up with the last group, answering whether politicians had seemed receptive to them the past month.
“Not really. Some really, really small baby steps. Someone said it was like they tried to take a giant leap forward and then tripped and fell really bad. This was stuff that should’ve just been there already.”
I asked her about Jackie’s assessment, that it would take years, like the civil rights movement.
“Probably. Probably going to be years. And like at this point, I don’t know if I mind, because like nothing that’s worth it is easy. So why would this be easy? We’re going against the largest gun lobby in America. We could very well die trying to do this, but we could very well die not trying to do this, so why not die for something rather than for nothing?”
Die trying? That unnerved me, and I asked what she meant.
“We could get shot by someone who’s like, ‘Don’t take away my guns!’ Which is not what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to take away anybody’s guns, but they misconstrue our message because they’re afraid of this becoming a slippery slope. They’re afraid of us because we have a voice now.”
A reporter asked about Emma’s expectations, and the PR person got angry that we were over quota and shouted as she tried to move Emma along: “Everyone back up!” But Emma was suddenly distracted, gliding over the concrete, sliding her hips to a Latin rhythm starting up on the massive sound system. She giggled that she and Sarah Chadwick had added Celia Cruz to the playlist, and what a bolt of joy for it to fill the air. She was eighteen—the right song could change everything. She danced back to the reporter who had asked about expectations, looked her right in the eye, and said, “My expectations just shot up!”
She apologized to another reporter who had tried to ask something while she’d gotten lost in the song. He repeated it: What was it like to be an inspiration?
“Why not inspire each other?” Emma asked.
After the last MFOL kid came and went, I reunited with Julia, who was glowing. “You’re a real journalist now,” I said. Most high school reporters were watching the stage show back home on TV. She had interviewed Sofie Whitney, Delaney Tarr, and Emma González—because she got her butt down there and had the courage to bluff her way in. “You’ve got to just keep trying,” I said. “Anytime somebody says no, treat no as a maybe.”
“I feel like that’s exactly what the kids from Parkland are doing right now,” Julia said. “They’re being told no by the most powerful people, the president of the United States, but they keep pushing to get here.”
Wow. Best insight of the day. These kids were all seeing things with different eyes.
3
Andra Day kicked off the show with a stirring performance of “Rise Up”—already powerful, but took on a whole new meaning. David Hogg broke with the norm to dress formally, with one of the $1.05 price tags clipped to his suit lapel. He gleefully explained the mystery to the crowd. They’d calculated the NRA’s donations to Marco Rubio, and divided it by the number of students in Florida. That’s how much each kid was worth to their senator, David said. $1.05.
The speeches were generally impressive, though most of the kids seemed to have written a tagline, and repeated it several times, à la “We call BS.” None would catch on. The speakers were all kids, and some of the scene-stealers were exceptionally young. Jackie Corin gave an uplifting speech, then said she had someone special to introduce, and returned wit
h Martin Luther King Jr.’s ten-year-old granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King. Not all King’s progeny inherited his oratorical skills, but afterward, Daniel Duff and Ryan Servaites agreed she was easily the second-most-powerful speaker. “She really is carrying on the voice and the legacy,” Ryan said. And for that family to lend that name to their movement—they were both kind of awed.
“I know for a fact that if Martin Luther King were still alive, he would be here right now,” Daniel said. “And very proud of her.”
Daniel wasn’t there for the celebrities, but had to admit it was fun meeting some. And they were everywhere backstage and in the VIP lounge. Some older lady in a tweed coat and knit cap was getting a ton of attention, so Daniel took a selfie with her, and then my photographer asked if he knew who she was.
Not really. Actually, not a clue.
“That’s Cher.”
“Oh my god, Cher!” Daniel yelled. He had just met Cher! Cher was in his phone.
He knew of Cher, he told me later, as an entity, not as a person.
Ryan Servaites wasn’t on the MFOL team, so he didn’t get Daniel’s all-access pass. So Daniel mostly gave up that access. He made quick trips backstage to check in with his MFOL friends, but for the most part returned to hang with Ryan. George and Amal Clooney wound up next to them. Daniel and Ryan were intimidated, but the Clooneys kept making small talk, and the boys came around. The four spent most of the show together.
The Peace Warriors Alex and D’Angelo made a big impression. They took the stage together in blue MFOL hoodies, their mouths sealed in neon duct tape. D’Angelo stripped his off. “We are survivors of a cruel and silent nation,” he said. “For we are survivors not only of gun violence, but of silence. For we are survivors of the erratic productions of poverty. We are the survivors of unjust policies and practices upheld by our Senate. We are survivors of lack of resources within our schools. We are survivors of social, emotional, and physical harm.”
Delaney Tarr demonstrated how comfortable she had grown as a public figure when her speech flew off the podium. She calmly walked over, picked it up, and resumed her speech with a smile. She had nothing on her classmate Sam Fuentes, who threw up in the middle of her impassioned speech. Two minutes in, near the climax of her poem “Enough,” she shouted, “It’s as if we need permission to ask our friends not to die!” But she began to falter on the next line: “Lawmakers and politicians will scream guns are not the issue, but can’t look me in the eye.” She tried to choke it back, but realized it was hopeless, turned her back, and let it rip. There were gasps, brief confusion, then a big round of supportive cheers that quickly died down. CNN cut away to crowd shots—distressed moms, shaking their heads, unsure whether to clap or cheer. It took nearly a minute for Sam to recover. Kids started chanting “Enough is enough!” Sam returned to the podium with a hearty laugh, and shouted, “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great!” Tyra Hemans rubbed her back tenderly at first, and then pumped her fist at the end of that line. Sam continued full bore: “We’re not asking for a ban, we’re asking for compromise. Forget your size and colors, let’s save one another.”
Some of the older Sandy Hook survivors, now in high school, recounted their horror in 2012. At the worst of it, they’d drawn tremendous solace from a simple act of solidarity, when Columbine survivors sent a banner encouraging them. Then they unfurled their own banner with their school logo, reading “Newtown High School stands with Stoneman Douglas” over a huge red ribbon. Messages had been handwritten in a rainbow of colors.
Eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler had beaten back a month of obstacles to reach that stage. In February, she began organizing the walkout at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, where she was in fifth grade. Her principal’s staff were opposing it, out of safety concerns on the school lawn. Were they safe inside? Naomi asked. She fought for her proposal at a town hall organized by her congressman. “How will we be safe in our own classrooms in the world we live in now when it’s OK for someone to walk into a store with an expired ID and buy an assault rifle?” she asked. She won that day, and sixty students participated. Naomi also insisted they honor the Parkland kids, and urban kids dying as well. Seventeen minutes was extended to eighteen, to recognize an African American girl gunned down in Alabama that week.
Naomi brought the same passion and confidence to the MFOL stage. She electrified the crowd. She also distilled a theme repeated throughout the rally. “I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper. I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.”
Shortly before three, Emma González took the stage and stole the show. She had put on the self-embroidered bomber jacket, and had shed the slouchy beanie to bare her signature scalp. She gave a short, fiery speech, recited the seventeen names, and then went silent. She looked straight ahead, began to grimace, fought back tears, lost that battle, and let them stream. She didn’t even wipe them off this time. The camera zoomed in and projected her face on the Jumbotrons—fifteen feet high, so the hundreds of thousands there, and millions tuned to laptops, phones, and TVs, could watch every quiver. It was spellbinding. She continued to hold it, and the crowd stood silent, awed. But as the minutes passed, people grew nervous: Was this intentional? Was she fighting to speak? Having a breakdown? Some kids in the crowd decided to “help,” and started a chant: “Never again! Never again!” The bulk of the crowd knew better, and it died down. A sea of moms—so many moms that day—stood transfixed. Emma suspended that crowd for four and a half minutes that way, then leaned back into the microphone to explain: “Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”
4
Two questions had murmured through the crowd, and the media tent, all morning: Would a massive crowd materialize, and could Emma possibly live up to her own hype? That “We Call BS” speech seemed sui generis. How could she compete with that? Had she found an even better line, could she wow the crowd without one? Or would she prove a one-hit wonder—the perfect alchemy of the moment, never to be repeated in her lifetime? (Yes, of course reporters are that catty. But civilians were wondering aloud too.)
She had not just matched We Call BS, she had blown it out of the water. I watched the speech with my colleague and mentor Joan Walsh, now a CNN analyst and a writer for The Nation, whose story that night ran under the headline, “6 Minutes and 20 Seconds That Could Change the World.” Would it? I wondered. I was pretty sure of one thing, though. For the hopeful gathered in Washington that day, this was the Emma we would carry for the rest of our lives.
But not everybody saw it that way. Joan and I had moved down to the railing along the edge of the press area, to watch Emma with the rest of the crowd. Debbi Schapiro, a Parkland resident and substitute teacher, stood beside us, and deep into the silence, she shook her head and murmured, “This is too much responsibility for these kids.”
I was aghast. Emma had decided it was exactly enough. Why deprive her of the agency to make her own brutal choices? My cheeks were soaked, it was hard to watch, but I saw a young woman radiating power. Emma was galvanizing a country like no man or woman, pope or president. And this well-wisher was just snatching it away. Adult reaction—maybe adults were the problem. I pictured Emma’s friends overhearing that. They were so sick of hearing that stuff. David Hogg said it day one: If adults had stepped up, they wouldn’t have to. And their friends would still be alive.
But I was torn. Schapiro saw a teenage girl breaking down in public. I saw that as the point, and felt pride and awe for Emma, not fear. She seemed so fearless whenever she spoke to me. Just a few hours earlier, she had told us she was prepared to die. That rattled me. This, she seemed capable of handling. But was she? Why was I so sure?
I remembered a story
Linda Mauser had told me ten years after losing her son, Daniel, at Columbine. She was having her teeth cleaned and began sobbing uncontrollably in her dental hygienist’s chair. The woman pulled back her instrument, and Linda apologized for disrupting the cleaning and failing to floss. “My child died! I’m sorry, I just didn’t feel like flossing.” The hygienist apologized, asked if it was recent, and didn’t hide her incredulity at the ten years. “When your child dies, it’s always recent!” Linda snapped.
I think about that story often. It was eye opening but humbling. I would have hidden it better than the dental hygienist, but after ten years, I still didn’t grasp the immediacy of her pain. I have no kids. I’ll never see this through Dad’s eyes, or Mom’s. So I watched the end of Emma’s silent speech trying to envision Patricia Oliver taking it in, or Andrew Pollack, Jennifer Guttenberg, Ryan Petty, all the moms and dads of the victims and the survivors. When Natalie Weiss had described Cameron calling to say “active shooter,” I’d gasped and said that must be the worst thing a mom could hear. Natalie cast her eyes down and said very quietly, “Second worst.”
So I carried Schapiro’s warning with me through the spring, summer, and fall. I heard it so many times, as I saw the kids teeter on the edge, or what I feared might be the edge—because that’s the tricky part. Trauma is unpredictable. It lurks for months or years, and can take you down in an instant. Debilitating depression can follow, or worse. Sometimes the cliff comes with warning signs. Other times, other kids dance along the edge oblivious, until the moment they careen off.
