Last night I dreamed I was being chased by a man with a gun. I ran and hid while he hunted me down.
I woke and all the hairs on my arms were standing on end. My mind was racing. I lay there in the dark, looking at the ceiling, trying to get the picture out of my mind—of a man with a gun, pointed at me. What I thought about, too, as I lay there, too awake and disturbed to sleep, was what it would be like to have experienced a situation like that for real, like the kids of Parkland. What a name. Parkland. Sounds like the name you’d give to a wholesome suburban community, though possibly a satirically wholesome suburban community. I thought about waking in the night to stare at the dark, mind racing, after being in lockdown in your classroom, after hearing gunshots in your school’s halls, after seeing someone shot and killed, after hiding, terrified, thinking you will die. And I thought, the March for Our Lives is not hyperbole for these kids. I thought, if someone with a gun has come into your school, you understand, in a way that others may not, how dire the situation is, how far gone, and you’d do anything, now, to prevent this happening to another kid, in another school.
I thought, this won’t end until enough people refuse to accept it as their reality.
I’m so glad I don’t live in the United States. It breaks my heart to say so, because I am a dual citizen, and because dear friends and family live in the States and love their country, and because there are so many good and wonderful things in the US. I grew up in the States. It was once my home. I remember when Canada seemed terribly foreign, even though my dad’s family had Canadian roots. Canada was cold and unknown, and I didn’t want to move here. I was ten. I’ve never moved back to the States. I’m almost wholly Canadian now. We have our own problems and even our own gun problem; but it doesn’t compare, nothing compares to the madness of the gun—the worship of the gun—in the United States of America. It’s almost as if guns are more sacred than life itself, in the USA. Certainly, the right to own and carry a gun is more protected than the right to be protected from gun violence. If the best answer politicians can come up with is more guns, arm the teachers, “harden” the schools into what amount to prisons—that’s not protection for the kids, that’s protection for the guns, again. Sell more guns.
I want to march. I want to go to Washington and march against the almighty gun.
The kids who are marching, the kids who’ve organized this, the brave outspoken truth-telling kids of Parkland feel like they’re living in a war zone. They’re living in a developed nation, a nation of enormous prosperity and wealth, yet they are not safe—they know they are not safe. They know this will happen again, and again, and again, in churches, in schools, in homes,on streets, and so they march. I hope they never give up hope. I hope they march and march and march for their lives until they change the course of history. I’d believed for so long that there was no changing this story—that mass shooting would follow mass shooting would follow mass shooting, with nothing but thoughts and prayers to comfort the survivors. But these Parkland kids, they give me hope. They’re changing the narrative. They’re digging in their heels.
I always thought the gun would win, because don’t people with guns always win?
But, no, they don’t. They don’t. Violence doesn’t always win. Power and bullying doesn’t always win. Money doesn’t always win. Oh, how I want to believe this.
Oh, how I love the kids from Parkland.
xo, Carrie
Oh Carrie, your words are so powerful! One can only admire these kids and how they are speaking truth to power.