Every time this happened yet again it only seemed to confirm that nothing was ever going to change. After Sandy Hook, and the Pulse, and Las Vegas, and all the countless other place-names now associated with horror and violent death, nothing changed. Each predictable, expected, ordained iteration of the inevitable only served to confirm that the powerful people profiting from the manufacture and marketing of all this death were untouchable, unaccountable and unstoppable. Nothing changed and nothing was ever going to change.
But this time, it seems, something is ch-ch-ch-changing. Maybe not all at once, or quickly, or entirely. But here is a New Thing, a disturbance in the pattern, a new variable the powers and principalities didn’t seem to have foreseen and inoculated against.
Someone is giving a damn. And, just by doing so, they’re demonstrating that The Powers That Be are not quite as invulnerable as they seemed.
The backlash against these kids is going to be ferocious. It will start cautiously, but very soon it will get ugly, intense, and relentless. It will be funded by the deepest of deep pockets and will employ the full arsenal of Madison Avenue and K Street propaganda. The Powers That Be will use all their usual tactics to counter the solidarity they fear — threats and extortion, sowing division, spreading lies, buying off another generation of lick-spittle lackeys, etc.
Most of these kids’ timid elders will shrink into their usual bystander role, wringing their hands and worrying about “controversy” — gladly sidestepping responsibility and reburying their heads in the sand. Their parents may start to worry that protests will harm their chances of “getting into a good school” (as though any school that saw such protests as a negative could, in any way, be described as “good”).
For a sense of the kind of full-court press that such irresponsible adults will impose on these kids, just look at what’s been done to distort and dismiss Black Lives Matter and what’s being done to suppress #MeToo.
But these kids have at least two things in their favor when challenging powerful men like Wayne LaPierre and Donald Trump — the leaders of the death cults that insist nothing must ever change.
For one thing — just like BLM and MeToo — the kids are right. They’re telling the truth and standing by that truth. In the short term, power doesn’t have to care about that. But in the long term, the truth matters.
And that’s the other thing these kids have that LaPierre and Trump do not: a long term. In 20 years — probably less — those wrinkled old bastards will both be worm food. And these children that they spit on will just be getting started.
• March 14, 10 a.m. — National School Walkout
• March 24, Washington DC — March for Our Lives
• April 20 — Nationwide School Walkout
These are first steps. I can’t wait to see what the next steps will be, and where this journey may take us.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In