I have family in Florida. They were the first people I thought of when I learned that someone had taken a gun into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 people. I thought of my cheerful young cousin who would one day go to that Parkland-based high school, and of my aunt, who knew a student who attended that high school.
My cousin was safe. My aunt’s friend was dead.
The following day, I went to school and realized it could have been me. The tragedy could have been us. Our school could have been the one holding a candlelight vigil, and our parents could have been the bereaved. For the rest of that day, I drifted through the halls on shaky legs, haunted by the realization that it could have been us.
I drifted home. My cousin, I learned, had been afraid to attend his elementary school that day, and now dreaded going to high school. I was speechless. He was just a child. To him, school should have been a place of innocence, a place of books instead of bullets. He shouldn’t have to worry about anything but tying his shoes correctly. But he did worry, because he was just a child whose innocence had been destroyed because of the Parkland shooting. I was powerless to change anything.
I then read about Emma González, a senior who had survived. At an anti-gun protest three days after the tragedy, she made a speech about the immense capacity teenagers have to change the world.
I doubted her at first; in her speech, González said that adults might not take teenagers seriously, because the conventional adolescent is perceived as shallow: “self-involved and trend-obsessed,” as she put it. In my mind, I wondered what any of us could do to change this stereotype, especially since most teens couldn’t even meet the age-limit to vote.
Teenagers could do a lot, I soon learned. During the shooting, González and a few of her peers had used technology to record footage of themselves huddled together in the back of their journalism classroom. They had used social media to spread the word about what was happening. Later, they made their way onto CNN, where they debated with a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association (NRA) about automatic weapons. They inspired major companies such as Delta Airlines to disassociate themselves from the NRA. González even created a Twitter account which swiftly gained more followers than that of the NRA.
I thought about my young cousin, and wondered if González had been right when she insisted that our generation would be immortalized in history textbooks for successfully campaigning for firearm reform.
Maybe teenagers would become the reason my cousin will not be afraid to step through the doors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Maybe we could even become synonymous with the word
“change.”
There is no age-limit for making a difference.l
Danielle R.Published March 2018