Not Right Away

Some facts are so obvious on their face that they don't really bear repeating anymore. For example, we know the penalty for running in the vicinity of police in the United States is summary execution, preferably in front of your loved ones.* And as an added bonus, after you're dead, the people on Fox News (or similar) will celebrate the life you've laid down in the name of the Infallible Authority by recounting any time in the past you may have done anything at all that might be construed as untruthful, unsavory or illegal. Because, again, we all know and accept now that even if running in the vicinity of police while unarmed in your own backyard or on a public street isn't always an automatic immediate-death-penalty offense, it can be made one in retrospect if Very Concerned** People on television can put together a dossier with enough traffic tickets or juvenile shoplifting offenses. Compile enough of those over the course of your early teenage years and being shot to death, if you think about it, kind of becomes inevitable.

This last week, we've begun to learn something else: sure, it's possible to become unintentionally famous by not being killed in firearms massacre in a school, but using that attention to suggest anything that might be construed as less than full-throated enthusiasm for the gun-positive status quo means you are volunteering to also be publicly outed as a liar communist Nazi traitor. By adult Americans. When you are an adolescent survivor of a mass shooting. These are true things.

The testimonies of the Parkland, Florida, shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been, as we all would have suspected, searing and raw and difficult and inspirational. We've seen heartbreak and world-ending grief after many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, MANY, MANY, MANY, MANYMANYMANYMANYMANYMANYmanymanymany[etc. to infinity] similar incidents like this in the past, but this is the first time the affected children (important note to repeat: children) have seized the press monster by the throat and tried to wrestle it into something that actually works in the direction of measurable change.

Their message includes (but isn't exclusively) a strong emphasis on a rational approach to gun control in the United States. The result has been for one of these children to be referred to by a(n adult) political candidate as a "skinhead lesbian," dismissed as a pro-Castro communist by a sitting (adult!) member of the United States Congress and enduring an online smear campaign using false captions and doctored imagery to suggest she is both herself violent AND a hater of the United States Constitution. If both those things were true, basically the suggestion is that she's a member of the sovereign citizen movement like such social pillars as Cliven Bundy and his ilk, except those are the types celebrated by the people now coming after the child survivors. Because America 2018 is so post-ironic.

In these cases, there's not really much the target of these attacks can do, beyond the art of the clapback. I mean, sure, they've proven to be noisy and not at all amenable to the strong suggestion that they should sit down and take their PTSD in silence and then be there (quietly!) waiting to support (off camera!) the next group of kids to come trembling and screaming out of another shot-up school, spattered with the viscera of their classmates. And the cycle rolls on...

Or... maybe not?

This group of people seems to be stubbornly fixated on the idea of actual change. The March For Our Lives event was incredibly inspiring and drew hundreds and hundreds of thousands of participants, but a quieter, subtler thing happened this week that made me realize these kids really understand the battlefield they've been drafted on to.

When a nameless Fox News shitbird took time out of her nationally broadcast program to make fun of a teenaged boy--whose name she ONLY knows because he was one of the ones shot at but not killed in Parkland--for not getting in to all the colleges he applied to, the same teenaged boy then singlehandedly took to twitter to identify this person's program sponsors, who then one by one have begun to withdraw support for her show.

This is how politics now works in this country. Debate solves nothing. They do debate as programming on cable news literally every night. The only person it seems to be helping out in any way is Chris Cuomo, god help us. I mean, I'm sure he's a fine person or whatever, but none of what the hosts of these shows do constitutes a positive social contribution. But debates are between people, which is the politics of the last millennium. No, the entity with the biggest stake in this is the NRA, a corporation. A money-funneling operation. Come for someone's opinion, you just get one back. Stakes-wise, all you get are competing headlines proclaiming one side "eviscerated" the other, depending on which slanted-ass aggregator blog re-vomits this bile.

If you come for the money, though... Come for the money and even the Fox News demonspawn have to force-swallow a handful of feces and publicly apologize. To a kid. Who was shot at and didn't die already.

Yeah, it's small, but I allowed myself to feel a little bit of hope. Not because of the result. Because of the approach. And the idea that maybe this isn't the first thing to move; because these kids seem to innately understand where the levers are. These are the children of the post-media media. Fuck with them at your peril.

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*Probably needs to be said even less that this obvious rule only applies to certain specific segments of the population. And yet somehow, I feel compelled to SHOUT IT OUT ALL THE TIME.

**White