American teen-agers disdain hypocrisy

By Emily Witt
February 17, 2018

... The first hint that something might be different this time came the morning after the shootings, from a Douglas High School sophomore named Sarah Chadwick, who informed the President of the United States, via his favorite medium, in words that quickly went viral, "I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot." In the hours that followed, others joined Chadwick in rejecting the platitudes. On social media, and on live television, the victims were not playing their parts. They were not asking for privacy in their time of grief. They did not think it was "too soon" to bring up the issue of gun control—in fact, several students would start shouting "gun control" within the very sanctum of the candlelight vigil. What was already becoming clear that night, less than thirty-six hours after the shootings, was that the students were going to shame us, all of us ...

... the grief had not stalled the protest, which, if anything, was growing louder in tenor over the course of the day, as more of the politically active students saw their messages go viral on social media and shared their opinions on television. I had read earlier that day about students at nearby South Broward High School staging a solidarity rally to advocate for gun control earlier in the afternoon. Now, as I left the funeral, I saw a group of eight or ten people standing on a street outside a Walgreens waving cardboard signs in support of gun control. I spoke with the founder of the protest, a thirty-two-year-old named Robert Lopez, who had no personal affiliation with Douglas High but had simply arrived to the street corner at eight-thirty that morning with poster supplies, a case of bottled water, and several snack-sized bags of Doritos in assorted flavors. The other protesters had joined after driving by. “We’re not going to wait until it happens to our own kids,” Emily Pratt, who has two children in a local elementary school, said ...

By Saturday afternoon, three days since the shooting, the local politicians were helping the affected students amplify their message. At a rally in the shade outside the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, several hundred people who supported the movement gathered to rally for gun control. It was the students and teachers of Douglas, however, who provided the moral center of the event. Their grief was raw, their rage palpable ...

... in unison, the people gathered began to chant, "Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/three-days-in-parkland-florida