This year, on Valentine’s Day, while other kids were sheepishly handing each other roses and tacky Hallmark cards, in Parkland, Florida a shooter entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and shot 17 people, 14 students and three teachers. In the ensuing chaos, the shooter stowed their weapon and joined the throng of people racing to the exits, their face blending in with the crowd of student running for their lives.
School shootings have become such a commonplace occurrence in America that an all-too-familiar pattern has emerged; there are a few days of headlines, politicians vow to do something, the country mourns and then – put simply – something else happens and people begin to forget.
But the Parkland students refused to bend to that narrative. Tired of watching grown-up politicians behave like children, these teenagers channelled their grief and their anger and their fear into a movement that led to the biggest youth protest since the Vietnam War era.
Cameron Kasky, a 17-year-old who became one of the most high profile of the students, had the idea for the hashtag #NeverAgain (while he was "wearing his Ghostbusters pyjamas"). He invited classmates Jaclyn Corin and Alex Wind over to his house and together, they started to use the hashtag on Twitter. Over time, more and more kids joined the group, until there were almost a dozen of them, sprawled out on one of their parents' living room floors, strategising about the best way to get their message heard.
A lifetime of social media equipped the Parkland students with the ability to start an online movement
They appeared on news segments and late night talk shows. Almost overnight they became prolific on Twitter. George and Amal Clooney donated $500,000 to the cause, as did Oprah and a dozen other celebrities. Within weeks the #NeverAgain headquarters moved from living room floors into an actual office space.
And on 14 March, exactly one month after the shooting, over a million students across 3000 schools stood up from their desks and walked out of their classrooms for 17 minutes. One minute for every person who woke up on Valentine’s Day morning, showered, got dressed, went to school and never came home again.
But the momentum didn't end there. On Saturday 24 March, in 800 locations across the US and the world, more than a million people took to the streets to take part in the March For Our Lives protest to demand Congress act on gun control.
Emma González, one of the most prominent spokespeople for the #NeverAgain movement, spoke at the event. After taking the stage and talking for a few minutes, she stood at the podium, completely silent, staring defiantly into the crowd until an alarm went off on her phone, marking 6 minutes and 20 seconds since she took to the stage – the exact amount of time as the shooting that took place at her high school, a little over a month earlier. González implored the crowd: “Fight for your lives, before it’s someone else’s job”.
Another Parkland survivor, Samantha Fuentes, who was shot and injured in the attack, also took to the stage to recite a poem she had written about the shooting. Part of the way through she vomited on stage – but after composing herself, wiped her mouth and continued reading. At the end of her speech, she led the crowd in a rendition of Happy Birthday, dedicated to her friend and classmate, Nicholas Dworet, who was killed in the shooting. March 24 would have been his 18th birthday.
When all this started, politicians were willing to write these teenagers off. They made the mistake of believing the grumpy commentators who say millennials are lazy and apathetic and entirely unable to focus on one task. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Politicians made the mistake of believing the commentators who say millennials are lazy, apathetic and entirely unable to focus on one task. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, a lifetime of social media equipped the Parkland students with the ability to start an online movement, to harness their confidence in front of a camera and turn it into moving interviews, to manage a million different things at once in the midst of their immense pain, without ever taking their eye off the ball.
There are lots of things to take away from the #NeverAgain movement, but perhaps the most important one is this: if you ever doubt the difference young people can make, remember that a group of kids from town no one had ever heard of, whose names no one knew, got a million people to take to the streets. The entire world is talking about their campaign, and if future teenagers are lucky, it just might make a difference.
