Campaign Action
A hundred Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students boarded buses Tuesday to deliver a simple message to the GOP-controlled state legislature 400 miles away in Tallahassee: You're either with us or you’re against us.
The quickness with which these students are mobilizing, their social media savvy and their message has caught conservative activists and Republican lawmakers flat-footed. They don't want hopes and prayers, they want action. Every minute wasted is another failure in leadership and another life on the line. As Stoneman Douglas senior and shooting survivor Emma González said when she called "BS" on lawmakers' inaction in her impassioned speech over the weekend:
Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. [...] if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it's time to start doing something.
Compare that to GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan's business-as-usual humdrum responses last week following Wednesday's shooting.
"This is one of those moments where we just need to step back and count our blessings...
"This is not the time to jump to some conclusion not knowing the full facts...
"Right now, I think we need to take a breath and collect the facts...
Bullshit, says González and her peers. Did the kids at Stoneman Douglas have a moment to "take a breath" while they were being shot at? No. And neither will the next victims of a mass shooting in Anytown, USA.
This is what urgency looks like. This is what moral leadership looks like. This is what the beginning of a movement looks like.