Walk-out
I was in a meeting when the whining text messages started:
“Will you pick me up soon?”
“Are you coming?”
“Did you leave yet?
“MOOOOOMMMM”
“I’m so sorry,” I said to my colleagues. “I need to go pick up my protestor.”
Charlie had participated in a walk-out in protest of gun policies that facilitate school shootings, and now, point made, she needed to be picked up and driven back to school. I had thought she was too young to watch the news coverage of the shooting in Uvalde, and it turned out she was also too young to protest the shooting without a note from her parents. So, that morning I had written that note giving her permission to leave school grounds for the purpose of civil disobedience.
The kids left school around 11:00, and they walked to Squaxin Park, a place they know well from play dates, birthday parties, and hot dog cookouts. It’s the park with the pirate ship play structure. It's where we used to take the nerf bow and arrow before we lost all the arrows. The kids would shoot the arrow, throw the bow down, and sprint after the arrow. Repeat until exhaustion.
The kids took markers and pieces of recycled Amazon boxes and made signs with very adult messages written in their childlike handwriting and decorated with drawings.
“Violence has no home in our school”
“No more gun violence”
“Our blood Your hands”
Charlie’s sign said, “Stop shootings not abortions.” I’m not sure exactly how those things are related, except that neither is particularly age-appropriate for 12-year-olds, but here we are.
“This is a lot of kids,” I say to Charlie, while we are watching the videos she took. “Yeah,” she says. “The eighth graders kept doing head counts so they knew how many of us there were. It was 130.” Head counts. So smart and responsible. I’m reminded that in Lord of the Flies, about the first thing the kids did was lose one of the little ‘uns. Yikes. These kids are too young for the responsibility of keeping track of 130 middle schoolers. Come to think of it, they’re also too young to be protesting mass murder.
I’m watching Charlie’s favorite 8th grader standing on a picnic table with a bullhorn, reading the names and ages of the kids killed in Uvalde. I know that picnic table. Once, after an exhausting week, we picked up a pizza and took it to that picnic table so the kids could play and we could skip the dirty dishes. The child with the bullhorn reads the name of a child who was killed at 11 and interrupts himself, “ELEVEN! Some of you here are 11! That could have been a sixth grader!”
Another video. A seventh grader with her hair in two braids, sunglasses on top of her head. She screams into the bullhorn, “Why the fuck do we have to be scared?!?” The crowd shrieks their approval, and Charlie grabs for her phone. “Yeah, sorry, Mom. I accidentally took a video of the one swear word there was all day.”
Another video. An eighth grader in khakis, a denim jacket, and a ball cap, holding a piece of paper with his thoughts on it. I realize—this kid voluntarily wrote an essay and is reading it aloud in front of 130 kids. Do you remember how much fun that wasn’t when you were in eighth grade? He reads into the bull horn, “The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you should be able to enter a building and shoot people because you feel like you don’t have control in your life.”
I’m stunned by the empathy and wisdom. He’s not talking about scary bad people. He’s talking about someone who is hurting, and who, because we have the wrong policies, was able to hurt others.
These are young people who have not yet put aside their childish things. Some of them—too young for PG-13 movies and T-for-Teen video games—haven’t even grown into their childish things yet. Still, here they are doing everything they can think of to beg us to take care of them and keep them safe: Skipping school, standing on picnic tables, swearing in the park. Writing an essay. Reading it out loud. Taking marker to cardboard. Yelling. Crying out.
In the 10 days since the walk-out there have been 26 mass shootings in the US, killing 39 people, and injuring 106 more.