And before anyone makes any 4/20 weed comments, the date is the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
Damn straight.
Fuck, I’ll host GED classes in the damn library if it keeps kids safe. I’ll share what skill with words I have, what life experience I have, and make sure that the kids in my community come home safe and stay that way.
Remember kids: Student walk-outs and sit-in protests are incredibly effective, because it means that the system is breaking down. Their authority only goes as far as you let it.
Don’t bring weapons to protests.
Don’t bring mace or tear gas to protests.
Get bottled water, at least six bottles per person for four hours.
Pack a first aid kit. Ace bandages, band-aids, water, dried gatorade (a scoop in a bottle of water helps prevent heat stroke due to dehydration), and sunscreen.
Keep emergency contacts on all cell phones, and if possible appoint someone in the group to be the designated emergency contact caller. Their job, if shit goes south, is to run to safety and call parents, call friends, call help, not just the police.
Don’t be afraid of Juvie. Your record is expunged at 18, if the crime isn’t something like murder.
The public school system cannot function without students attending, this is a supremely effective strategy.
Keep up with and take food to those who rely on free and reduced lunches. Find a homeschool co-op or go attend classes at those online k-12 things. If you’re old enough to drive now is the time to start carpooling.
just a reminder that this is also to teachers. this is circulating in my program. that teachers are just as much a part of this creation for a walkout, too. because no teacher should have to go to work thinking they’re going to die alongside their students because congress refuses to do anything.
teachers: walk out. for your students. for yourselves. walk out.
Communities: Support the FUCK out of these kids and their teachers.
I was in sixth grade when the Oklahoma City bombing took place. Tiny little babies died; measures were taken to prevent anything like that from happening again. Our government promised us that we were safe, and demonstrated it by making it SO hard for something like that to ever happen again.
I was in the seventh grade when the Port Arthur massacre happened. We were assured that we were safe. I remember hearing about the shooting, but it was on the other side of the world; surely it would never happen here, and certainly not in a school. We were safe. But I remember listening to all of the talk about the second amendment and feeling very, very uneasy at how much guns were being defended rather than people.
I was a freshman in high school the year of Columbine. I remember being so afraid. The whole world had changed in the blink of an eye. The schools didn’t know what to do to keep us safe, but we were assured everything possible was going to be done. We were sure our government would keep us safe.
Nothing changed.
I expected it to- after all, after the Oklahoma City bombing, SO MUCH was done to prevent another incident like that from EVER happening again. You couldn’t buy the ingredients for such a bomb easily anymore. Posts were installed in front of important buildings to prevent people from driving into them. Steps were taken.
But nothing changed on the gun front. The arguments continued and guns continued to have more rights than people.
I was a senior when the towers fell. THIS time, changes would happen to keep us safe- if our country was attacked from the outside, surely the government would move heaven and earth to keep their kids safe, right?
Overnight, changes took place. The TSA became A Big Thing. You couldn’t take sharp items onto planes. All kinds of things were confiscated. There were x-ray machines for our belongings, x-ray machines for our bodies, x-ray wands to check if the machine went off, your belongings were searched if something looked sketchy. You couldn’t have too much TOOTHPASTE anymore in the event that it might be an explosive. We had to take off our shoes because someone made a bomb out of a shoe.
And STILL guns had more rights than people. Nothing in that corner EVER changed.
I remember being terrified during tornado and fire drills, and kids in other parts of the country had other kinds of drills, I’m sure, for earthquakes, or other natural disasters. The kids during/after WWII and the cold war had atomic bomb drills. Kids were trained to do these things because these are things completely out of our control- if bombs rained down on us, it was from outside of our country. If a tornado ripped through my town, it was an act of god, not something we could prevent.
Active shooters are pretty preventable, as evidenced by Australia- they’ve NEVER had another gun massacre, in 22 YEARS, because they fixed it then and there, while gun control measures went round and round in endless circles in America, never changing.
An entire GENERATION of kids have been forced to learn lockdown procedures and have active shooter drills, because our government has done NOTHING. Guns STILL have more rights than people- more now than when I was little, it seems.
Walk out. Communities, come together to support our kids and our teachers. They don’t deserve to die.
“In addition to Yale, more than 40 universities, including Brown, Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have issued statements supporting prospective scholars who may heed the calls of the Parkland survivors and risk school disciplinary action by joining protests.“
Okay. As a parent of a disabled child, please make sure their parents have an inkling of the days these are happening since I’ve seen several dates floating around now.
Reach out to the parents or their teacher to see if they’re participating. I know my son, if he sees students get up in large groups, even though he doesn’t entirely understand what is happening, he will follow the group. And if a teacher doesn’t stop him and he slips out, he hasn’t the capacity to get home alone. But his disabilities are all invisible, so passerbys won’t know he perhaps needs help.
If I have dates and the days timetable, I can arrange someone to pick him up in solidarity.
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