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Teen Spirit
They’re saying it for all of us, these kids, these teenagers, these young leaders who seem to have changed the world by saying what the grown-ups couldn’t.
“Now what scares me most is silence,” said a former Marjorie Stoneman Douglas student (I could not get her name) to the crowd of several thousand gathered in the gleaming sunshine in front of Miami Beach Senior High for the March For Our Lives on Saturday. “My friends are weeping. The families, my town, I am broken. But we will not be silenced. There is a full-fledged fire inside my heart. I hope you can dig down deep and find a spark in your heart.”
It was already ignited. This girl, and the others from her generation who joined scores of young speakers in Washington DC and across the country, are saying what frustration and a toxic combination of cynicism and helplessness kept most of us adults from saying for so long. Until the March For Our Lives protests that flooded the nation’s streets and thoughts and airwaves on Saturday unleashed the rest of us. They’ve enabled us, made us brave, made us angry, given us hope — from the children finally able to speak out about their terrors to their parents who never knew how to explain that they could be next.
