Emma Gonzalez

Emma Gonzalez is my hero. In a world filled with instant celebrities and movements, she took social media, and the media, by storm with an impassioned speech that went viral, making her the face of a movement.

Oh, and she wasn’t even on Twitter.

Knowing that fame is fleeting and that people quickly move on to the next big news story, she created a Twitter account,  an account that is verified, and is making sure that her voice is heard. Loud and clear.

Emma, along with those kids who suffered through an unimaginably traumatic event, started a movement.

What Emma Gonzalez, along with those teens, is doing is nothing short of amazing.  And, by the way, I don’t mean amazing because I disagree with number 45 or because I’m Republican or Democrat or Independent.

Amazing because after surviving a school shooting, that took the lives of 17 people, they didn’t go crawl into a hole, which would have been completely understandable.

Nope. They became activists.

Fierce activists.

Emma Gonzalez stands out. Right or wrong, she is the one who was picked up by the media. Maybe it was the shaved head. Or the determination. Or both, but there was something about her that made people stop and listen.

She makes a compelling figure, a young woman who survived a mass shooting at her school and then, within days,  made a choice to stand up to a country that seemed unable to figure out its crap. Maybe Emma doesn’t have all the answers, but she is calling on all of the grownups who have failed her to this point.

Yeah, that’s us.

I don’t know the answers. I think the 2nd Amendment is important for a lot of reasons. I also hate guns. So, I guess add me to the long list of grownups who haven’t done enough. How do we balance the right to bear arms and create legislation that addresses what happened in Florida, what happened in Sandy Hook, what is happening at an alarming rate all around this country?

 

We owe our kids,  Emma Gonzalez, all of them, we owe them conversations that will lead to answers. It shouldn’t have taken another school shooting, another 17 lives. Emma Gonzalez appears comfortable in her role, but it is a role she should never have had to take on. She should have had the luxury of being a teenager looking forward to graduation and her future.

Instead she is a teenager who now realizes that having a future is a luxury that some of her classmates will never have.

Attending school should not have life and death consequences.

Parents have enough to worry about. Now they have to worry that their kid is being hunted down by someone looking to kill as many as possible. At school?

How did we get to that point?

The grown ups need to figure it out. And if we can’t, then I say thank God for kids like Emma Gonzalez who will figure it out for us.

A lot gets said about the next generation, but what I’m  paying attention to is Emma Gonzalez, and the kids that are just like her, and the way they are taking a situation that would make most grownups wet themselves and turning it into a movement.

They are organizing.

They are showing all of the adults that if we don’t get it together, they will do it for us.