Activist Kids Rule!

I thought Wednesday morning, March 14^th would be a solitary moment of street art for me,in solidarity with the Women’s March Youth EMPOWER’s National School Walkout. I live a block from C.W. Henry Elementary school but I had no idea if they planned to walk out, so I printed out my own series of “No More Guns” posters and planned to staple them around the neighborhood’s phone poles. The Walkout was planned for 10 A.M. in every time zone, seventeen minutes to honor the people who were killed at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School a month before.  As a self-employed teacher, (The Sandy Hook shooting happened three days before I completed my student teaching.) I felt that it should be a moment of connection and solemnity for me.

I had just started putting up the posters when there they were, the Henry students with their teachers and principal. The children were silent and serious, well, as silent and serious as elementary students get. Kid art is my favorite thing in the world, and these children’s signs, most of them on orange poster board (orange is the gun control color), saying things like “Our Lives Matter,” and “Enough,” “Guns have no place in schools,” and “Protect kids not guns,” illustrated in painstaking detail. I’m happy to say that no art I make will ever be as beautiful or meaningful as those signs. Feeling like a mini-Shepherd Fairey, I gave the kids the rest of my own posters, then stood back with other neighborhood adults to marvel and support.

“How lucky we are to be alive right now,” goes one of my favorite quotes from Hamilton, and those seventeen minutes were as complicated and bittersweet as that line.

When the seventeen minutes were up, the neighborhood cheered and the kids proceeded silently back to their classes. It was beautiful to see them speaking up for themselves and the school being so supportive of their efforts. As I watched the school walkouts follow the time zones across the country on facebook, I felt a powerful sense of hope for America, my natural optimism galvanized by my seventeen minutes with the brave kids of Mt. Airy.

Art by Cece Mulcahy, bedazzled by me post-walk-out because I wanted to spoil the neighborhood. 

On Saturday, March 24, my best friend and I were among the 800,000 people who joined the Parkland students at the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. It was the same solemnity and power that I felt with the Henry walkout, multiplied by thousands and soundtracked by Andra Day’s anthem “Rise Up,” Lin Manuel Miranda’s new single “Found/Tonight” which reprised lyrics from Hamilton including, most importantly, “Tomorrow there’ll be more of us.”

It was at the March for Our Lives that I met Zahlia, a six-year-old young lady marching for the first time. When she saw the sparkly butterfly on my sign, her eyes lit up as though I were the queen of the universe. I asked if she would like the sign, since it was clearly meant for her. I’m so proud that I got to be a small part of her march experience, that I was able to give her just a fragment of the joy and celebration she deserves.

Sometimes, its hard to feel worthy of the children that I teach, the children that I share a movement with. They are so bright and generous, so beautiful and courageous, shining with a light we are lucky to stand near, lucky to be edified by.

It shouldn’t be their job to save us. The Parkland students should be working on their school plays and goofing around on Snapchat or whatever new weird things the kids are into these days. But instead, they are serving their country, helping us to be better and safer and wiser. I’m excited to see the country they’ll create, and I’m here to help in any way I can.

Life-Changing Summer, Part Three

I want to note that as I write these cheery posts, the death toll of the summer is sticking with me and I am seriously considering taking anti-depressants for the first time in my life. The best way through still seems to be acknowledging the magic parts, though.

The Room Where it Happens! I was there when Bernie Sanders moved to nominate Hillary Clinton for our FIRST FEMALE MAJOR PARTY NOMINEE! Well, I was outside eating a salad because Amy was having a leg cramp and we couldn’t find a chair inside, but still.

The most moving moment of the convention for me, though, was when the Mothers of the Movement spoke. Their courage puts every single other thing in perspective. To experience the worst loss, the worst injustice, and still have the hope and power to get on stage and fight for change—how do they do it?! The entire convention broke out into a chant of “Black Live Matter.” I couldn’t see the stage from the entrance we were guarding, but I peeked behind the curtain and watched the crowd chant. It was one of the most galvanizing things I’ve experienced. Our country and our party has a long way to go toward being as inclusive, fair, and humane as I’d prefer, but to me that day looked like concrete evidence that progress had been made.

And although, during other parts of the day, I was irritated by the boo-y Bernie delegates, I can’t help but take comfort in the fact that they were chanting for peace, even as we disagreed on the best ways to get peace. When I was fourteen and the first Gulf War started, I ached to have been alive for the peace protests of the Sixties. I’m sure there were protests, but from where I stood it was flags and yellow ribbons as far as the eye could see. I wore a white ribbon for peace and refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance at school, cried when I was called anti-American. My mom was so awesome because she marched through the suburban streets with me, two of my friends, and a boombox playing Beatles songs. My friend Lynn even knocked on a few doors. Now, in 2016, delegates are chanting for peace and I can join a march every day if I wanted to. So much better than my teenage dream of the 60s.

My Brother’s Wedding: I thought it might be sad to go to a wedding with my ex-wife as my plus-one, but this was an unequivocally joyful day, an oasis of beauty and peace that showed me just how far my family has come. Plus, this happened:

The Disarm Hate Rally: It seemed pretty crazy to drive down to D.C. in the middle of a heat wave. It was one. Billion. Degrees. on August 13, but I thought it was important to have a positive catharsis about the truly alarming parts of the summer, so we packed up all of the water and went.

As we walked across the field near the Lincoln Memorial, it felt like crossing the dessert. A few people were standing in front of the stage and many others huddling in cooling tents. A couple of handsome young men came over and gave us Hillary stickers. Code Pink was there being right about gun control and super-bummer-youth-voter-suppression-wrong about the election. (It’s a weird year when I feel at odds with Code Pink.)

It seemed like synchronicity that a group of teenage poets from my neighborhood spoke just after we arrived. The family next to us had rainbow signs quoting The Lorax:

I was given a sign to wear that said this:

And I’m doing my best to believe it.

We met Gays Against Guns and signed a poster to Orlando from the Newtown Alliance. Pro-gun control groups have been such a source of inspiration and strength for me this summer, and I hope to work more closely with them in the coming years.

After wards, we walked to the Lincoln Memorial and the Martin Luther King memorial:

I thought a lot about why these edifices are there. What we are really trying to accomplish as a nation, what America is truly supposed to be—I don’t know. If, as Lin-Manuel Miranda would have us believe, history has its eyes on us, how are we doing?

Pokémon Go: It saved my life. No really. At the beginning of the summer, I was afraid to cross the street. The world was full of bloodthirsty cars and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get back to my usual taking-long-walks self. But then the Pokéstops went in and I forgot to be scared. Since the day I was hit by a car, people have not-so-helpfully reminded me to be careful crossing the street, but I had more than enough (maybe way too much) vigilance in my life BEFORE the accident—I wasn’t interested in forming new fear-patterns in my brain. Collecting Pokémons tricked the fear into not becoming permanent, and it got me moving again. Plus, there are few things more happy-making than strolling down to the neighborhood gym and chitchatting with strangers about really ridiculous things. The perfect counterpoint to a way-too serious life.

Now the air smells like turning leaves and the morning glories are blooming. I can feel my body relaxing into fall, ready for kids and mums and art projects and WINNING THE DAMN ELECTION already. Thanks, life-changing summer—I hope to keep planting those seeds.

Happy Goals for an Activist Summer

This has been a different kind of summer. While my arm heals, I've been skittish about swimming, so the beach hasn't dominated my life the way it usually does. Luckily, it's a great time to find all kinds of meaning volunteering for the Democrats and marching/vigiling for all kinds of change. I wish there were a lot less vigiling, but I feel lucky to have a chance to stand up for people when I can.

What a School Lockdown Feels Like

What a School Lockdown Feels Like

At the time of my ill-fitting classroom stint, I was so busy hating the School to Prison Pipeline that it never even occurred to me to hate guns, but looking back, they were always in the background of my anxiety, hanging over my head with the other million things that hang over teachers’ heads.

I had a class full of third graders the first time I experienced a lockdown. It was almost lunch so I had that next-level needing-to-pee that teachers know so well. We were just getting ready to line up when the announcement came. They said there had been gun activity in the area. They told us that we were supposed to lock our doors, but mine didn’t lock. I’d never been trained for the proper procedure, so I sat the kids all down and told them to be as quiet as they could so we could be safe if we needed to hear directions.

I pictured what I came to always picture in those situations: the bullet coming through the glass and hitting me, or hitting them. I never forgot that I while at that moment I was trapped, on a daily basis I was choosing to be there, and the kids were not so lucky. Poverty would keep many of them in an unsafe neighborhood, the law and a racist system would keep them in unsafe schools that violently opposed their individuality and development. They might someday know a life without the penny taste of adrenaline in their mouths, but the odds were stacked against them.

We sat crisscross-applesauce at the back of the room, as removed from the window glass as possible. They were preternaturally calm and docile, and I had an uncharacteristic command over myself that I can only attain at times of deepest crisis. We played Whisper-Down-the-Lane and The Quiet Game until the lockdown ended and it was time to line up for lunch.

I experienced maybe ten school lockdowns, for all kinds of reasons—a lost kid, a panicking parent, mostly they were unexplained and I never asked because I didn’t want to know. But the helpless bullet-is-coming-for us feeling did not fully go away. Those left me with an unshakeable knowledge of the vulnerability of all life, but especially the lives of African American children. The confluence of guns, poverty, and racism put the lives of my students at risk every day.

I understand, in a cursory Hamilton-infused way why we have the Second Amendment, but the cost of the way it is currently interpreted is much too high. Those kids, those classrooms, along with the children I currently serve at the library, are part of the driving force behind why I feel so urgent about this election, so moved by John Lewis and other who stand up for gun control and against injustice. Enough.