When Babies Rebel
They came from across the country.
They assembled in almost 100 cities, and in cities around the world.
Who are they?
Teenagers, High School students mostly. They were the survivors of the latest St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, from the carnage of a Florida school where a deeply troubled young man waged war against other young people and made Marie Stoneman Douglass High the latest death-site, like Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine.
But something new emerged from the death and destruction in Parkland, Florida.
The children rebelled.
They looked at the so-called adults who were supposed to protect them, and, perhaps for the first time, truly saw them. These adults, police and politicians, looked at their pain, their trauma, and barely raised an eyebrow. They were too busy protecting the gun lobby—the NRA—who paid millions for such service.
They learned that if it was conflict between their worth as children, and interests of the rich and powerful, they would lose.
So they screamed at the adult world, its hypocrisy, its evil—and they rebelled.
They protested, and shook the nation.
They woke from their childish slumber, and saw politics as the poison it’s always been.
Their voices—so youthful and new—now echo around the world as a new youth movement emerges.
They now know something that separates them from the play and folly of childhood.
They know that they can no longer depend on the adults.
They know that they must organize; or nothing will change.
–Prison Radio, March 25, 2018