The Wild Reed: The Student-Activists of 2018

Thursday, March 29, 2018

The Student-Activists of 2018 – Leading Us to the Future

Kids were sent from heaven inside
to lead you to the future
Wrap their eyes in blindfolds
and still they'll find their way
Blind their lives with pills and lies
and still they find their vision
And soon they'll leave you to your yesterday

– From "Generation"
by Buffy Sainte-Marie

This past Saturday, March 24, I joined with approximately 18,000 others in the "Minnesota March For Our Lives" in St. Paul.

Led by students and other young people, the event was one of hundreds of marches and rallies held in solidarity with the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC., which drew over 800,000 people to the streets of the capital and was organized by survivors of the February 14 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Five of these students – Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, Emma González, Cameron Kasky and David Hogg – feature on the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine, with writer Charlotte Alter's cover story entitled "The School Shooting Generation Has Had Enough."

Those who participated in Sunday's March for Our Lives events across the country are demanding that elected officials act to end gun violence in U.S. schools and communities.

One of the most incisive commentaries I've read on the current student-activist generation is the following by Michael Hussein Tallon.

Today has been a day of awakening for me, and I suppose it has been for many of my age-contemporaries, too. As a fifty-one year old man, I don’t cry much, but, wow, have I been a weepy mess all day today watching these magic kids. And that’s the term that keeps coming back to me: These kids are magic.

They somehow don’t seem real. They seem more like fully formed wizards who just popped into existence, as if the shooter who tore through their high school just showed up expecting sheep and found warrior-paladins instead.

But then it makes even less sense, because they aren’t just from Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. They are kids from everywhere. And they keep demanding that the media recognizes that they are from everywhere. These kids, these magic kids, keep saying to the interviewers, GO TALK TO THE OTHER KIDS. GO TALK TO THE BLACK KIDS. GO TALK TO THE POOR KIDS. GO TALK TO THE LATINO KIDS.

Then, as happened time and again today, when the cameras finally turn to the black kids and the Latino kids and the poor kids, THEY talk about other kids.

This isn’t a story about Parkland, Florida and a really smart AP class with great prospects. It’s about a full-on generation shift that caught me, and I’m guessing you, totally by surprise. These magic kids are from EVERYWHERE.

Which begs the question: If they came from everywhere, then how did they happen?

The NRA and their sad, angry ilk have a readymade explanation: They’re actors. They’re following a script. They’re shills of Big Peace. Whatever. All that is insane, of course, but you can almost understand the confusion. The kids just don’t seem normal. They aren’t what we understand children to be, which of course is to say, “They aren’t like us. They aren’t like we were when we were kids.”

And so we cast about for an easy answer.

But perhaps the answer isn’t easy at all. Perhaps the answer is through a mirror darkly.

Millennials (who, believe it or not, are now in their thirties) and these Gen-Z kids have been painted with the most unflattering colors by my Gen-Xers and the Baby Boomers before us. We’re the ones in positions of power in the world and what do we do? We call them all a bunch of crybabies. We give them endless grief for their constant insistence on things like “white privilege” and “non-binary sexuality.”

We mock them for their safe spaces and their sensitivity to being triggered by language. We tell them they need to toughen up. We tell them that the world is a harsh place, as if we know better than them that brutal truth.

I think the reason we are so surprised by these kids is that we’ve spent so many years telling ourselves that they were “snowflakes” who were going to get blown away by the real world, that we missed the coming storm.

God, were we wrong.

The truth is these kids didn’t spontaneously erupt from Florida a month ago. They have been deconstructing the bullshit of our generations for their entire lives, and now they’re ready.

Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening “Red Alert Levels” and endless “Active Shooter Drills” and the ubiquity of “Rekt” videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace. Like it or not, they have lived every day of their lives, twenty-four-seven, on the battlefield.

We give them endless grief for playing video games. We tell them they should be outside, at school – but for so many of them, the schools and their streets are “soft targets.”

God, I’d stay in and play games where the bullets weren’t real, too.

These kids grew up with the native ability to parse the OBVIOUS racism of Trayvon Martin’s murder, of Tamir Rice murder, of Philando Castile’s murder, of African American teenagers in McKinney, Texas getting the shit kicked out of them by police for being in a “white” neighborhood for a pool party. Just two days ago, they watched Stephon Clark get put down by over-amped, trigger-happy police while he was in his grandmother’s backyard. They can see with their own two eyes that our society is grossly unjust – and so when the camera focuses on David Hogg, we shouldn’t be surprised that this smart-dressed white boy says, TALK TO THE CHILDREN OF COLOR, as he did just yesterday in an interview with Axios. We shouldn't be surprised when he says “Our parents don’t know how to use a fucking democracy, so we have to.”

They’ve seen how badly we’ve screwed up a free society for their entire lives and they are, in their own beautiful way, “calling bullshit.”

The kids didn’t magically arise in a fortnight; their whole lives have been calling bullshit.

They are digital natives with an ability to see the whole grand world. As such, they note that we’re the only economically advanced nation in the world where 30,000 people die from gun violence every year. They aren’t cloistered in their own communities playing kickball, so they know that those deaths are skewed all to hell in the obviously racist, classist ways that are evidenced in the above mentioned state-sponsored crimes of racial bias. They know that Trayvon, Tamir, Philando and all the others aren’t aberrations in the data set.

These kids might just be learning to shave, but Occam’s razor is intuitive. You need to train yourself into NOT believing obvious truths. Maybe Gen-Xers and Boomers have learned to bend themselves into a knot over that, but these kids? Not a chance. Of course they call bullshit on that.

When the “adult” generations sit on our hands and say we can’t just get rid of AR-15s because of the NRA and their power, of course they call bullshit on that.

When politicians who are blatantly sucking money from horrible people who manifestly make their world worse, of course they call bullshit on that.

We adults – and FINALLY with some level of self-consciousness in these matters, I’m speaking as a middle-aged, white, privileged, man – have been so busy lampooning their beliefs, that we missed the point where they just went ahead and actually included everyone into their generational tribe – regardless of their race, gender-identity, sexuality, religion, or class. We’re still arguing about gay wedding cakes and we’re still OBVIOUSLY treating kids of color worse than white kids. Of course they call bullshit on that.

What we missed, and why we’re so surprised that they have “magically” appeared, is that these kids threw our bullshit overboard years ago. They don’t need our rigidity. They don’t ever again need to hear someone say, “Hey, everyone is a little bit racist.” They have no time for our “God-hates-the-gays bigotry.” They have no place for our transphobia.

Grow up on a battlefield and you lose your illusions. They’re well over our befuddling myths of the way the world must be.

Moreover, they know they’ve got a fight ahead of them.

They are looking square into a future denuded of the possibilities we older folks took for granted. They can see, quite clearly, that like plagues of locust, our grown-up generations have stripped the nation’s resources, beshitted the global environment like we had a spare planet tucked in the garage under a tarp, presided over the destruction of our own middle class, and for a kicker, welcomed a parade of nationalist buffoons with fascist tendencies back into power.

These kids can see the tribalism and they know that soon they’ll be ascendant.

Their tribe is different than mine or yours. For now, they’re young, but for all the rest of their time on this planet, they will be multiracial, non-binary, non-dogmatic, digitally native, omnivorously curious, and significantly bigger than either the surviving Boomers or the aging Gen-Xers.

These kids didn’t spring suddenly from nowhere. They’ve been watching us and learning from our nearly countless, self-imposed mistakes. They’ve seen us run in pointless ruts, like cattle through an abattoir, and they’ve decided that’s not for them, and so they called bullshit.

They're calling bullshit and they're not making any safe space with their language for us if you consider this withering fusilade of truth from Mr. Hogg.

“It is truly saddening to see how many of you have lost faith in America because we certainly haven’t and we are never going to. You might as well stop now because we are going to outlive you.”

Yes, thank God, you will. But for as long as I can, I'll follow you into the future. I just hope I can keep up. I have so much to learn.

#Enough
#MarchForOurLives