Last week there was a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Following the shooting, many of the survivors—high schoolers—have come together to voice their outrage at the current state of gun regulation in America, spearheading a movement to pass better gun control laws, with the hope of preventing what happened to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High from ever happening to another American school. You can find out more about their cause here.
Just days before the attack, I began editing and writing the afterword for a play I wrote last year, Tallahassee Ca. 2045. In the play, a group of high school students (heavily inspired by my own very politically conscious friends from high school) organize a protest for youth rights, to lower the minimum voting age. After a global catastrophe strikes, the nature of the protest changes, and it steadily grows out of control, ultimately collapsing with little more than token reforms made. And it takes place in Tallahassee, capital of Florida. Needless to say, I wish the MSD students much better luck than the characters in my play.
So for the past week, these students, and the way people are reacting to them, and the way some people are trying to discredit them, and whether or not they’ll succeed, and the fact that most of them can’t vote, and the general perception of teenagers, have all been on my mind. I’m in Spain right now, and I so wish that I could be in my hometown of Tallahassee to protest in front of the capitol, or even just in Iowa City, where I go to school. I would love to throw my support behind these kids by physically marching with them, but I can’t. What I can do is post this.
If you can’t tell already, it’s a strange post. It’s not really about gun control, but rather about why we should listen to the kids campaigning for better gun control right now, and general misconceptions about the apoliticality of kids. My main purpose here is to provide insight into my personal understanding of young people, particularly high schoolers, re: politics—which should be a pretty solid understanding, given that I’m 20. So, here we go. The following is a segment of the Tallahassee Ca. 2045 afterword, adapted slightly for this post.
You could say that I fell in with the right crowd in high school. “Fell in” because, for the most part, I met them first as friends of friends, not through any shared extracurricular interest or from any effort on my part to meet new people. And “right crowd” not because they were straight-laced t-totalers or anything, but because they were incredible kids (and are incredible people, for that matter.) They were kids who talked about politics during lunch. Kids who talked about, and argued about, Ferguson and Santa Barbara and Syria, about Common Core and Jackie Pons and gay marriage, about dress code and rape culture and climate change. Kids who made up jingles about socialism. Kids who discussed gender and sexuality without the tied tongues of adults nor the giggles of less mature kids. Kids who participated in Model UN and Peace Jam and GSA. Kids (a few of them at least) who once went to the principal to ask that he improve the school’s nearly non-existent sex-ed. Very liberal kids all, some of whom had liberal parents and some of whom had conservative parents. Kids who were vegetarian and vegan. Kids who acted, kids who ran, kids who wrote, kids who played instruments, kids who spoke Spanish, a kid who spoke Portuguese, a kid who spoke Russian, kids who knew Latin (and who could speak it, though it’s Latin, so they mostly didn’t.) I don’t mean to give the impression that we were all just pundits or politicians—we of course did talk about other things, about teachers and homework, tattoos and vacations, books and movies, food and theatre—but these are the relevant points for this afterword.Read More »
Francis Bass 