For Parkland Students, a Surreal Journey From ‘Normal’ to a Worldwide March

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/us/parkland-students-gun-violence.html

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WASHINGTON — Little has returned to normal for the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School since Feb. 14, when a gunman killed 14 of their classmates and three staff members.

They juggle homework with activism. They wince at loud noises. Sometimes, they sleep.

But to the huge crowds that greeted them in Washington on Saturday at a march to protest gun violence, the students were fearless celebrities.

“We’re here for you, Douglas!” a girl shrieked as five teenage boys from Stoneman Douglas and their history teacher made their way to the main stage.

“Go Douglas!” said the teacher, Greg Pittman.

As the crowd broke into applause, the boys remained stoic. They held up their poster boards — “It is a school zone, not a war zone,” read one — and looked straight ahead.

They were part of a group of 200 people from Stoneman Douglas, in Parkland, Fla., who were sponsored by Giffords, the gun control advocacy group, to come to the Washington march. An alumni group raised enough money to get more than 550 additional students to the rally, a spokeswoman for the group said. Others traveled to Washington on their own, some of them rooming with family and friends.

Despite their numbers, their steady presence in the news, their unmistakable influence on the national debate over guns, some of them were trying to be teenagers again.

It hasn’t been easy.

The five boys did not organize the event on Saturday, called the March for Our Lives. They did not lose a relative in the shooting. They were not injured.

But their coach, Aaron Feis, was killed. Their school was forever changed. And now, they were in the nation’s capital, feeling hundreds of eyes on them as they walked down Constitution Avenue.

“There’s a lot of emotion,” said one, Adrian Kauffman, 16.

The five boys, all sophomores, refrained from endorsing a specific policy proposal or calling out politicians they dislike. They arrived to show strength in numbers, “so nothing like this happens again,” said Adam Hostig, 15.

“Most teenagers talk about drama about girlfriends and boyfriends,” said Zach Cooper, 16. “And we’re talking about bomb threats and guns.”

“Nonstop,” Adam said.

A police helicopter hovered overhead. Adam’s eyes darted up suspiciously.

“Even coming to an event like this, it’s scary,” Zach said.

None of them paid much attention to the politics of guns before the shooting, they admitted. “We got more informed,” said Evan Kuperman, 16.

The march will make it “feel like the people who died did not die in vain,” added Josh Funk, 16.

Amid their newfound activism, they have tried to return to lives that resemble those they had before their high school turned into a mass-murder scene.

“You get a sense of guilt trying to have fun,” Josh said. “But at the same time, you just want to be with friends and family all the time. To never miss a moment.”

In Washington this week, the Florida visitors sponsored by Giffords went to museums and shared late-night ice cream sundaes in a hotel ballroom with foosball tables and a Pac-Man machine.

But they also roved the hallways of the Capitol, meeting with lawmakers and lobbying for action on gun violence. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, dropped in on their hotel. Some of them met former Vice President Joe Biden.

“I’ve gotten about nine hours of sleep in four days,” Aly Sheehy, an 18-year-old senior, said near midnight on Friday. “But being around other people that understand what I’ve gone through just recharges me.”

“On Sunday, we’ll all be exhausted,” she added. “But then we’ll go back. For something this important, I’ll make the time.”

“They definitely think we’re going to go away,” Jose Iglesias, a 17-year-old senior, said of politicians and skeptical adults. “We know what we’re doing. We have tactics. They think we’re just children.”

The students knew that interest in their cause might fade outside their own schools. They knew that for the grown-ups, the march, which was organized in a little more than a month, might seem like the culmination of their efforts. “It’s just the beginning,” Jose said.

On Saturday morning, he awoke early. “In my sleep, I called 911,” he said. “Really it was my alarm that kept going off.”

“I have flashbacks of running into a classroom,” said Sarah Pierre, 17, a senior.

Over breakfast, students made last-minute signs with Crayola markers. Natasha Martinez, a 17-year-old junior, got on FaceTime with her mother, who was attending the march back home in Parkland. Her mother worried that Natasha was underdressed for the Washington cold. “I’m wearing the thermal, a turtleneck, this hoodie I bought, and a coat,” Natasha insisted.

A friend sitting next to her, Isabel Chequer, a 16-year-old junior, waved at Natasha’s mother.

“She has a special pass,” Natasha said, pointing at Isabel’s neck. “Injured club!” said Isabel, who was twice grazed during the shooting. She was one of 17 people hurt.

Isabel fears the shooting will make it impossible for her to watch action movies anymore, despite her interest in film.

“I feel like I can’t see those movies again, like ‘Black Panther’ or ‘Annihilation,’ which makes me really sad, because I love movies so much,” she said. “It’s taken a little bit from myself.”

“I feel weird doing normal things,” her schoolmate Aly said.

Throngs of marchers soon took to the streets downtown. Students from Stoneman Douglas and other schools delivered speeches, some choked with emotion as they described living with violent memories, survivor’s guilt and the ever-present shadow of fear.

Samantha Fuentes, an 18-year-old senior who was shot in both legs during the shooting, went on stage to read a poem.

Halfway through it, she appeared to get nervous and quickly ducked behind the podium. She stood back up as people rushed from backstage to help her. “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great,” she said with a laugh, before reading the rest of her poem.

It ended: “Will you give up? Or is enough enough?”

When the speeches — along with performances by Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and others — were finished, and the crowds began to disperse, the Stoneman Douglas students became tourists again, albeit ones who had moved thousands.

Amanda Lee, a 17-year-old junior who had been in one of the classrooms where shots were fired, left the rally with other students, pausing to snap pictures of the cherry blossoms that had started to bloom along the street.

Amanda said she had expected more of an actual march than speeches and a concert. But the magnitude of what they had accomplished in less than two months, she said, hit when she saw images of protests across the country and around the world.

“It sinks in,” she said. “And then you feel that you’ve done the impossible.”