Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  And MFOL had achieved one dream, of drawing some Republicans to their cause. In some key swing districts, like the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, the House candidates ran on gun safety on both sides.

  Both the NRA and gun safety groups claimed victories in several House races—itself a game changer. For the first time in a long time, the gun issue was at play, Spitzer said. “It worked mostly to the benefit of gun safety in a way we have not seen for almost twenty years. I think it has also given the gun safety people real momentum to continue their activities for the next election cycle, which of course will be a presidential year.”

  The NRA was also losing the money battle, another first. Earlier in the year, it admitted to big fund-raising problems, and in this cycle, it spent only $11 million, half what it spent in the previous midterms. For the first time ever, it was outspent by gun safety groups, which spent $12 million.

  The NRA’s aura of invincibility had been ruptured, Spitzer said. “It had this reputation, if they target you for defeat, that (a) they’ll make your life miserable, and (b) they’ll probably succeed.” That was never true, he said—there was a mountain of data disproving it. But it was believed and feared, and acted on. But this election really blew a hole in that marked-for-extinction narrative, he said. “They have no visible effect on the outcome at all.”

  The fight would really get hot in the presidential year, but Spitzer was actually looking past that. “The question is, what does the Republican Party look like in a post-Trump world?” he said. “Either it’s very small and even more hard-core, which means they won’t be winning many elections, or they’re going to have to broaden their base somehow. And an issue like gun safety could be one amenable to bipartisan support.”

  Spitzer said the gun safety movement had a long way to go, but they had broken a huge barrier. Their cause had been seen as untouchable, the third rail of American politics. “It’s no longer a third rail,” he said. “It’s been deactivated, de-electrified.”

  5

  The best evidence that the gun third rail has been deactivated came two days later, from the presumptive House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. She announced that House Democrats would prioritize “bipartisan legislation to have commonsense background checks” on gun sales. That obviously wouldn’t pass the Senate, and President Trump would veto it anyway, said Professor Spitzer. “But it has a very forward-looking objective, first because it’s low-hanging fruit. Pelosi knows that well. It’s a good campaign issue. And once the House passes it, she’ll have bragging rights to say that every Democrat in Congress supported this bill, and the Republicans killed it. It gives them kind of bragging rights to say, ‘Look, we’re doing what the majority of American people want us to do, but the obstructionist Republicans turn a deaf ear to that.’ It’s a useful club in the next round of elections.”

  Epilogue

  1

  “I’m sure you saw a video of me crying,” Jackie said after Thanksgiving. “I was very emotional. It was months and months of work compounding into one single decision. Obviously it was very much more dramatic in the moment. The next day I woke up, I was breathing, I was fine, the world didn’t end. It continued to motivate me. I’m very much fired up again.”

  The election brought another reckoning. The MFOL had cleared the highest hurdle yet. Time to re-evaluate. “People are going to college—Brendan and Delaney and Sofie—so we just need to figure out what the internals are going to look like in 2019,” Jackie said. They had a big group meeting set for the first Sunday in December, to see how involved everyone wanted to be, and restructure a bit accordingly. They were also looking into creating some full-time paid staff positions. If they were going to last as an organization, it was going to require more than volunteers.

  For Alfonso, the reckoning came about a month before the election. “Before, my life used to be one hundred percent march, one hundred percent gun control,” he said Thanksgiving weekend. “And now I’m trying to do a fifty-fifty. Because I’m realizing that in order to get the message that we want—change laws, policy, get people registered to vote—we need to do some growing of our own as well. I have to apply for college; I have to get a job.”

  He said he had watched a few of his MFOL peers land in the hospital from exhaustion, and he was on the same path. “I had gained weight, I didn’t shave for a while or cut my hair, I was wearing the same clothes,” Alfonso said. “I was slipping in my grades, I had less energy, I slept in way more, working at the office more than doing homework, I looked like a shell of my former self.” And it wasn’t just him suffering. His room was a disaster, he wasn’t helping at home—but little Putin was taking it hardest. Alfonso had a lizard the size of his forearm, and Putin’s cage was messier than Alfonso’s room. Some days, he was out of water. That was bad.

  His parents had cut Alfonso a lot of slack in the spring, but by fall they were concerned, and telling him so. “I ignored my dad, I ignored my mom, I didn’t want to hear any of it,” Alfonso said. “And one day I kind of realized, ‘OK, you’re seventeen, he’s fifty.’” Alfonso was barely seventeen, just had his birthday in October. He admired his dad, always looked up to him—when had he stopped listening to him? “I realized I gotta grow up,” Alfonso said. “So about a week goes by, and then I just start changing little things. Like, finally shaved, finally cleaned my room, right? And in about a week and a half, one night I was just restless, I couldn’t sleep, it was about three in the morning, I basically said, ‘OK, I gotta do something.’ So I cleaned my room spotless. I did some chores, which was three in the a.m., which was ridiculous, but I was having a little breakdown. I was like, ‘OK, let’s start.’ And in the last month or so after, it really sank in. I’ve been losing weight, I’ve been more responsible, I’ve been more respectable, I’ve just been a better overall human being.”

  He was thinking about seeing a therapist now. “Even though I’m doing so much better, I can’t just fix myself physically. I also have to fix why I was like that for some time.” He still wrestled with survivor guilt. He was unnerved by the anxiety that still pervaded Parkland. “Out of nowhere every time there’s a fire alarm, kids start crying in school. Or people still have mental breakdowns or panic attacks. Like I’ve had.”

  Alfonso needed to pace himself for the movement too, he realized. And his future in it. School had become an afterthought, as though he had learned all he needed already. “I’m not even an adult yet,” he said. He planned to take on better debaters than Marco Rubio one day. He needed to get educated about history, and politics and rhetorical devices, and logical fallacies . . . He had to go to college. And make it a priority. He got serious about his applications, and his study habits. This was a marathon. He was seventeen.

  2

  MFOL had a long-term plan. “We created March for Our Lives and we want to see it demolished,” Jackie said. “We want it to demolish itself so it doesn’t have to exist. It shouldn’t have had to exist ever.” But that might take a while. “I just really hope by the time I am thirty years old, March for Our Lives is a thing of the past,” she said.

  Meanwhile, they had big plans. As of December 2018, they had mapped it out only through the following summer, because they liked to stay nimble and keep revamping on the fly. And more kids would be going off to college then, including Jackie. She would have to pull back somewhat, but would still be involved. She, Matt, and David were the student members of the 501(c)(4) board.

  Jackie’s goal for the next nine months was to set MFOL on a course whereby it could function with a lot less of her. She laid out three big focuses for the organization in 2019: policy, creativity, and infrastructure.

  They were eager to help Congress take on the gun issue, as well as all those state legislatures in which gun safety advocates had seized control. They planned to be a big part of that conversation—and were looking for creative ways to keep the public engaged. Especially their generation, with videos and collaborations with entertainers—having fun had always
been a big part of their appeal.

  But as always, Jackie would take the lead on the more mundane stuff. Infrastructure, and building out the network behind the scenes. They had recruited over seven hundred sibling marches, and most of those organizers had remained active, but about a hundred had matured into full-fledged chapters, doing powerful work on their own. “I’m going to spearhead moving forward, like making sure the network of chapters is completely clear and very well organized,” Jackie said. That had been difficult to do while also working on the election, but now they could do it right. Her next big push was college campuses, where she expected to soon establish many more outposts.

  In January 2019, MFOL planned to announce a big event to help organize around. They planned to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the march with a major youth summit. “We’re bringing thousands of young people together to advance leadership skills and show the world that the younger generation plays a pivotal role in our political process,” she said.

  And their plans for the anniversary of the shooting? “We’re not doing anything,” Jackie said. “It should be a day of complete and total solidarity with the community. I’m just going to be with my friends that day. I don’t want to be organizing or facilitating anything.” Why commemorate the day that jerk took something from them? They’re going to celebrate the weekend they answered.

  3

  Fall brought a big round of awards and accolades, but the biggest thrill was winning the International Children’s Peace Prize, and traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, to accept it from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Two ChicagoStrong leaders came with them to accept it: Alex King from the Peace Warriors and Trevon Bosley from BRAVE. They had earned it. Alex had to apply for a passport first. Alex had never seen a house like Emma’s before March, had been afraid of how to act there—to walk on the grass or wear his shoes inside. He had never left the country, never expected to. “I never thought I would ever have a passport, ever need a passport,” he said. “My first time out the country going to Africa, that was just incredible.”

  At the ceremony, Archbishop Tutu described March for Our Lives as one of the most significant youth movements in living memory. “The peaceful campaign to demand safe schools and communities and the eradication of gun violence is reminiscent of other great peace movements in history,” he said. “I am in awe of these children, whose powerful message is amplified by their youthful energy and an unshakable belief that children can—no, must—improve their own futures. They are true change makers who have demonstrated most powerfully that children can move the world.”

  Tío Manny introduced the kids, standing beside a 3D-printed statue of Guac holding a sunflower. “Joaquin Oliver is officially a member of March for Our Lives,” he said.

  It was the fifteenth anniversary of the KidsRights Foundation, the organization that bestowed the award, so they brought most of the prior winners to Cape Town for the celebration. Jackie said the highlight for her was meeting the 2017 winner: “A Syrian refugee that made his own school in Lebanon. It was just insane to compare the two types of activism, because you can’t really compare them. It was definitely really cool and kind of overwhelming, because there’s always a sense of, ‘Oh, I don’t deserve this.’”

  But she was sure enjoying the adventure. They got to explore outside the city, out to Boulders Beach, still a long way from Antarctica, but close enough to spot penguins in the wild. “I was on a beach, a literal beach, and there were penguins and it was incredible,” Jackie said.

  Alex spoke gleefully about the penguins too, but reverently about another excursion. He rose hours before dawn one morning, to climb Lion’s Head in the darkness. As the sun rose over the mountain, a breathtaking vista took shape below him: the South Atlantic and the cape reaching into it, the distant outcropping of the continent he had dreamed of, that he’d come from, but unseen by his family for generations. A whole new life seemed to be coming into view. “That was my highlight of Africa,” Alex said.

  They took a long trip home, doing more press and conferences across Europe, missed Thanksgiving in America, and then Jackie was starting to recharge. She said she had begun to catch up since the election, and her grades were rising again. The last week of November, she took the whole night off to hang out with her family to put up the Christmas tree. (But then I texted her about some follow-ups, and she hopped on the phone for an interview lasting nearly an hour.)

  They had a few more awards to accept, and were ranked number four in Time’s Person of the Year issue. But Jackie was actually looking forward to finishing all that. “Then we’re done for the holidays, so I’m just excited to stop traveling so much, because I just need to be a normal freaking kid.”

  She was also thinking about college. In March, Jackie had laughed at the idea of her at an Ivy—and then blown her class rank with a second B plus. But she had reconsidered. December 13, announcements were sent online: “Congratulations! . . . the Committee on Admissions has admitted you to the Harvard College Class of 2023 under the Early Action program.”

  David, who had been mocked by Laura Ingraham for some college rejections in March, got the same acceptance message.

  They also got the chance to give some awards. Alfonso got to present a Courage Award to ChicagoStrong, which included the Peace Warriors and BRAVE and most of their comrades there. “I think those kids in Chicago are bigger heroes than we are,” Alfonso said. “And it meant more to me than almost anything I’ve done to justify to them that what they’re doing is important. What they’re doing is really big.”

  4

  As they took a breath for the holidays, the kids gazed back on that crazy year. With just a whiff of hindsight, it was the road they harkened back to most. The Road to Change. And all that summer, as they rumbled across America, right about the time that night’s town hall was beginning, Bruce Springsteen was taking a Broadway stage. He regaled his audience with guitar and harmonica, but mostly with spoken stories of his lifetime traveling those same dreamy highways, in beat-up cars, borrowed pickups, and endless rowdy tour buses—out of Freehold, New Jersey, and all the way back again—realizing his dream to “collide with the times.” Bruce spun his story chronologically, and each night it climaxed as he reached the present, about four minutes to ten. The stories were deeply personal, but he made an exception there, squeezing in one topical incident, a late addition to the tightly scripted show. He lamented the bleakness of the Trump years, and how it shook his faith in our future, until a sunny day in March, when a group of kids from Parkland, victims refusing victimhood, drew hundreds of thousands of soul mates to our capital, to remind America what we stand for. What we are capable of. The March for Our Lives Day, he called it. A day that changed America. A day that changed him. He described it so vividly, experiencing it from a distance, the sights and sounds invigorating him through his TV, the faith flowing back into him, the wonder restored. The dream of life. The rising. “It was a good day,” he said. “A necessary day.” And just like Jackie Corin, a young woman he has yet to meet, Bruce reached back fifty years, and drew a straight line to Martin Luther King Jr., assuring us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—but adding a stern corollary: “That arc doesn’t bend on its own.” Bending it takes a whole lot of us, bending in with every ounce of strength we’ve got.

  And right about then, in a church or gym in Bismarck or El Paso, another town hall was wrapping up, and Jackie and Cameron, Delaney, Dylan, Daniel and Brendan, Bradley, Jammal, John, Pippy, Adam, Amaya, Annabel, Sarah, Sofie, Alex, Alfonso, Samantha, Matt and Ryan, Morgan, Sheryl, Lex, Chris, Carly, Charlie, Michelle, Kyrah, Kevin, Naomi, Robert, Gabriel, Diego, David, Lauren, and Emma, and whatever freedom riders hitched a ride that week, were bending in. They would stagger to some strange bed, wake weary, bleary, a bit confused about where their pillows lie, but certain, absolutely certain, of one thing: that to their cause—to save every kid of every color from the ravages of gun violence—history wil
l bend.

  Time to stuff their suitcases, board the Bus to Somewhere, recharge each other with road giggles, and exhale that hope and wonder into another American town.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost I want to thank all the survivors who shared their stories and their lives, taking me into their confidence, their offices, and many of their homes. I won’t rename everyone in the story, but this is your story, and thanks for trusting me with it. Equal thanks to all the MFOL team mentioned only in passing or not at all. I’m sorry our paths didn’t cross, or came too late. (Charlie Mirsky, can’t wait to meet you!) Also their parents, especially Tío Manny and Patricia Oliver, Rebecca Boldrick and Kevin Hogg, Natalie Weiss, and Paul and Mary Corin. Equal thanks to all the MSD students, family, and Parkland residents who helped me understand their community, especially Carol Chenkin, Wendy Hunter, and Christine Barclay, all your staff, and the casts of Spring Awakening and Legally Blonde. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, that talk-back and your story of adapting Spring Awakening was a master class for me. Your musical helped me step out of this madness I’ve been immersed in for two decades and see it with new eyes. I listened to the songs on Spotify at the gym several nights a week for inspiration, and a bar to aspire to. If I could capture just a whiff of what I feel each time I hear “Those You’ve Known” I’d be a happy man. (Though I admit the one on heaviest rotation was “Totally Fucked.”)