A crisp, fall Friday evening. Traffic to get downtown is hectic and rush hour is at its true peak. I am driving down with Alana and our moms (Debbie and Sherri), ready to share this special experience together. Admission for students was free, and adult tickets were $26 but came with a copy of the book. I had been looking forward to this event since the second I found it during class, and now it was finally here.

Doors would open at 6:30. People of all genders, races, and ages would come and hear Delaney Tarr, Sarah Chadwick, and Jammal Lemy, current and former students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, discuss “Glimmer of Hope: How Tragedy Sparked a Movement”.The book was written by those three students along with many others.

“Not one more. We cannot allow one more person to be killed by senseless gun violence. We cannot allow one more person to experience the pain of losing a loved one. We cannot allow one more family to wait for a call or text that never comes. We cannot allow the normalization of gun violence to continue. We must create a safe and compassionate nation for our youth to grow up in.”

                                  -Mission Statement, March for Our Lives

The mission statement of March for Our Lives is simple. “Not one more”.

Earlier in the year, two girls from Stoneman Douglas came to talk about their stories at my synagogue. It was an eye-opening and inspirational experience that I will never forget, but I was very interested in hearing stories from new and different perspectives.

The event began with the three students discussing the background of March for Our Lives and how they came to be not only co-founders but co-writers of the book itself. After the shooting had happened, Sarah began tweeting about her frustration regarding what had occurred in her hometown. They became viral, and Cameron Kasky, the co-founder of “Never Again MSD” as well as March for Our Lives, saw how popular the tweets were and invited Sarah over to his house.

Plenty of other students were invited to Cameron’s without totally knowing why, but when Sarah arrived, she recalled, “It looked like a start-up business with schedules everywhere and that’s how March for Our Lives was born. It was as grassroots as it gets for 25 teenagers sitting on the floor,” (Chadwick).

They then talked about their trip to the state capital in Tallahassee, Florida, less than a week after the shooting had happened. The trip was completely organized by Jaclyn Corin, class president and student at Stoneman Douglas, and filled up immediately after sign-ups had gone out. I remember hearing this and thinking about how their community had experienced such a tragic event, and here they were, still able to come together and fight for no one else to ever experience what they had experienced on February 14th, 2018.

Delaney recalled how they had traveled to Tallahassee to fight, and most of the politicians were late or didn’t even show up. She said that one of the politicians said they weren’t a morning person so they didn’t want to attend. Other politicians that had been there had been told by teens that their best friends and relatives had died in an incredibly preventable school shooting and change needed to be made, but none of the politicians even took notes. They would sit and say things like “I’m so sorry” or “That must be terrible” and that was the only action that they took during the meetings.

Jammal said something that will stick with me forever. He was talking about how he played basketball for Stoneman Douglas. It was his first day of practice and Nikolas Cruz, Marjory Stoneman Douglas gunman, came up to him and a couple of his friends carrying a backpack full of bullets. At that time, Jamal just thought he was a weird kid for having a backpack full of bullets. He then said that now, he would make sure that Nikolas gets the help he needs. It broke my heart to hear that it took all of these tragedies in order to realize that we need to speak up and say something when we see hints and clues like these.

In Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed”, it says, “Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things…But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different,” (3).

Though what Jammal said was incredibly important, there was something much more important and something that hit way too close to home. Sarah was discussing with Delaney and Jamal when she said, “I was born after Columbine. Mass shootings are our reality. I remember Sandy Hook. That’s when we had our first live shooter drill. I was 11. Parkland is one of the safest cities. We live in a bubble. A suburban affluent white area. I never thought it could happen to me and then it did. What we’re trying to push for is preventative. Arming teachers is not preventative. We want to stop them from getting into schools in the first place. Treating shootings as inevitable is a horrible reality and that’s what we’re trying to change. In movie theaters and shopping malls and nightclubs,” (Chadwick).

When the discussion was finished, we then got in line with Alana and her mom to go up on stage and meet them. I remember my heart physically sinking when one of the organizers of the event asked for our jackets and bags for security reasons. It was just so sad to hear the kind of world we are now living in.

I immediately walked over to Delaney. I began to tell her about the shooting threats we experienced at Glenbrook North and how we had to continue to go back to school without knowing who the threat was directly from. Northbrook is incredibly similar to Parkland, according to Sarah’s description. It is a suburban bubble, white affluent, and a place where we never ever think that something like this could happen to our community until it does.

I told Delaney about our threats with the intention of wanting to know how they are able to go back to school, knowing who the shooter was, but having to trust that they are safe and that it won’t happen again. She responded by saying that education is my strongest weapon. It’s hard to go back to a place we spend our time every day getting educated when our world is where it is now, but we can’t let that keep us from going to school. We have to get up every day and use education as our strongest form of power in order to further grow our generation and push toward these changes in our country and world. I am very inspired by how my generation is reacting to these issues, and I am confident that if we keep acting, change will be made. My generation is the future.