You see them after every tragedy: the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, friends, and colleagues who have lived through what is an unimaginable event for most people. Somehow, instead of hiding away, they are out front, dealing with the inevitable mash of cameras, microphones, journalists, bloggers, well-wishers, and hangers-on. To add to their suffering, they must deal with entitled opinionistas, naysayers, trolls, and the genuinely ugly folks who feel compelled to issue threats via social media.
Yet they persevere, these physically and psychically injured people. Despite pain, loss, and soul-crushing grief that would lay most people low, they’ve appeared in public shortly after their experiences. They ask for understanding. More often than not, they advocate for change. A few might insist on assigning blame; far more insist on accountability.
Recently, a group of teenagers at Florida’s Parkland High School escaped death by yet another mass shooting. Now, some of them are calling on legislators to control, regulate, or ban the kinds of weapons favored by shooters at malls, rock concerts, and schools. These weapons–semi-automatic, self-loading, or whatever we choose to call them–are designed to inflict maximum damage in a minimum amount of time and they’ve been easy to procure by people who are crazy or just angry.
While the teens are widely supported, they’ve also encountered plenty of social media haters quick to accuse them of being either naïve children dazzled by the attention or opportunistic spot-light seekers backed by calculating adults. Some suggest that activism in the wake of tragedy is inappropriate. There are even those who suspect—or pretend to suspect—these poised and focused teens are paid actors.
How familiar that all sounds.
My husband died on 9/11. I spent a little time thrashing around my empty house. Social media didn’t really exist in 2001, just a few AOL chat rooms where eager participants engaged in conspiracy theories. When the journalists first called, I spoke about my husband. It helped, a little, but I remained at home and that was not a good place for me to be. My first steps at advocacy involved getting help for the families and also, to be honest, trying to articulate the painful peculiarity of our position: our grief was personal but also shared. We were in the public eye, like it or not. My voice, which had literally disappeared after my husband’s death, began to return. My will to live followed, although it returned far more slowly than I let on.
Finally, I screwed up the courage to express myself about the fallout from the attacks: a war with Iraq (a country that produced none of the hijackers), a deep division about how to treat Muslim-Americans, the ways in which 9/11, like so many tragedies before and since, became a shield for bad policy-making and fodder for the haters. Some of what I said put me at odds with other family members, or with talking heads, particularly on Fox News. The push-back hurt. I didn’t exactly shrug it off, but I didn’t stop, either.
The students who’ve chosen to be front and center impress me. I get why they’re speaking out. Because they’ve identified a single, absolutely relevant issue around which they can unite. Because they’re articulate, in the way smart, engaged teens can be. Because, yes, they want to make sense of an event that upended their young lives and ended the lives of their friends. Because the grief is too strong to lay quietly within them. They’re grieving, yes, but in their grief, they’ve become hyper-attuned to anyone who is trying to tell them how they should behave or how they should feel.
I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. They push back against the critical, envious outsiders and against those who try to politicize their actions, as if safety and common sense were simply one side of an argument. No, they insist, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t call us children and still fail to protect us. You can’t call us opportunists and then fail to listen to what we say. You can’t take our grief, our pain, and our resolve and use it to further your own agenda. We call that b.s.
I call it hope.