Pierce: The Country Is Broken. The Kids Are Alright.

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18568553/parkland-shooting-gun-reform/

The Country Is Broken. The Kids Are Alright.
The Parkland shooting may be a sea change moment after all.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 21, 2018

snip//

I’ve thought a lot about that as I’ve watched the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, stand up against the worst imaginable horror, and then stand up against the worst organized conservatism can throw at them. This should be a frenetic, happy time. There are sports playoffs and theater production and prom season is right around the corner. Kids should be excited about college acceptances and scholarship possibilities. They shouldn’t be going to this many funerals. They shouldn’t have to be the vanguard in the fight against this country’s insane attraction to its firearms. They didn’t volunteer to be victims, but they sure as hell volunteered to be warriors.

Outside of the indecent algae like Jim Hoft, much of the reaction to what the kids are doing from the “grown-ups” of the right has been utterly hilarious. Ben Shapiro, who literally has been wrapped in wingnut welfare swaddling since he was their age, has been tut-tutting the country about taking the emotional and immature reaction of these students too seriously. In National Review, Shapiro, who had a syndicated column when he was 17, had the brass-balled audacity to write,

“What, pray tell, did these students do to earn their claim to expertise?”

High-larious, I tells ya.

But the real high comedy has been to watch the conservative intelligentsia embark on a serious fool’s errand—namely, trying to battle with educated teenagers on social media. I mean, don’t any of these people have kids between the ages of 10 and 20? This is like the Redcoats marching back to Boston from Lexington and Concord. They’re taking fire from behind every tree and every stonewall, and they’re getting slaughtered on platforms they’ve probably never heard of.

I was initially skeptical about whether or not Parkland was going to matter any more in the long run than Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Las Vegas mattered. A lot of that has melted away. This may be a sea change in the issue. There’s a natural savvy at work here from kids who have spent the last few years creating communities on their laptops and phones. Now, instead of communities dedicated to TV shows, music, sports, fashion, and who’s zoomin’ who in fourth-period Bio, the communities being created are being created to design ongoing political action on an issue that literally was life and death a week ago.

This is how the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement, got themselves going in the media Stone Age. It can happen faster now, and it can spread around the world, and these kids know that better than anyone else does.

more...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18568553/parkland-shooting-gun-reform/

[raging moderate]

1. "If you feel confused, you are in touch with reality," the RW told us back then.

They were trying to keep us from doing anything about Civil Rights, about the Vietnam War.

NO, KIDS, YOU ARE NOT CONFUSED. YOU ARE RIGHT; THEY ARE WRONG.

[LuckyLib]

2. Excellent article. They are leaving those bought and sold congress-critters

behind. And Drumpf, of course, is completely out of his element.