The March for Our Lives and the Lockdown Generation

It is easy to dismiss the March for Our Lives as just another in a spate of protests that cost millions, makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for a day, and then disappear in the rearview mirror. It is equally easy to pin on the label “Generation Z” and view the march through the lens of a handful of young, market-ready “star” protest organizers.

Deflecting the conversation starts with that label; it sits uneasily on the new generation. We name populations with the most significant central idea of their time.

Boomers marked an explosive increase in the birthrate that followed the return of soldiers after World War II. Generation X took its name from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel about anxious, disaffected youth. Millennials grew up on the cusp between ages: the mystical turning of a thousand years and the cultural shift of the dawning information age. Ad-agency pundits struggled to find a name for the intervening target markets and thus begat Generation Y.

However, this is no end-of-the-road Generation Z. Whatever the pundits say, we are looking at the Lockdown Generation — with a decade of drills and emergencies already behind them, hiding silently in closets, practicing for the day a shooter with a military-grade weapon invades their classrooms. And they are really, really angry.

3/24/18: three Philadelphia shootings

You could look at any of them — David Hogg, Emma González, or steely 11-year-old Naomi Wadler, who spoke for the black girls and women who are so often not heard — and see their anger. All their lives they have been shadowed and stalked by the fear of a meaningless early death. It could arrive in the form of a stranger with a gun, any friend or relative with a temper, any policeman with or without a swastika tattoo on his arm.

It arrived within six minutes and 20 seconds at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 10 minutes at a an outdoor Las Vegas concert, a four-hour siege at the Pulse nightclub and left behind more than 125 dead and hundreds wounded. Meanwhile, the shootings continue here and in every city. In the 24-hour period that included the march against gun violence, two people were shot in Brewerytown and one in Center City.

In the face of such mayhem, politicians and pundits are using the movement’s youth to diminish its significance. Florida lawmaker Elizabeth Porter dismissed the students, saying, “Do we allow children to tell us we should pass a law that says ‘no homework’?” Is asking not to be murdered in algebra class is somehow equivalent to ditching homework?

CNN commentator and former senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum suggested “maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that." Instead of mobilizing for gun laws, he suggests that students learn to deal with death on their own.

Well, Sam Fuentes, who stood on that stage with her shrapnel wounds still healing, has already done that. How can we possibly find “take care of it yourself” a suitable response to the murder of our children?

Duck and cover

But the Lockdown Generation is done with their elders shrugging their shoulders.

I empathize with this generation that has been terrified into fury. My generation was called Boomers in honor of our parents’ fecundity, but we could rightly be called the Duck-and-Cover Generation. We ran through drills as utterly inadequate for surviving nuclear annihilation as a bucket of rocks is for stopping an assault rifle.

I remember growing up with nightmares of Philadelphia in flames (trying to outrun them on the el was a particular favorite). I can imagine the nightmares of children forced to practice being shot at, year in, year out, until the reality that help will not arrive in time becomes indelibly, ineradicably embedded in their psyches.

You solve it yourself or you die, just as Santorum glibly suggested. Meanwhile, your cries bounce off hearts of stone because you are a statistic to them, not flesh that tears and bleeds when the bullets fly.

Well, fuck them, and fuck the NRA. The “children” are already reaching voting age. Plenty of sleeping voters are awake now too, and there will be a reckoning.