I’ve mentioned around the shebeen before that my father spent 35 years as a teacher and administrator in the public schools in Worcester, MA. (Heart of the Commonwealth, represent!) Originally, he planned to be a lawyer when he graduated from Holy Cross. But then there was a big government program called World War II and he joined up with a big government program called the U.S. Navy.

When he came back, he did one desultory semester in law school and then went and got his Masters in education. Years later, after he’d passed, my aunt told me that he’d once explained his career change to her. “After everything he saw in the war,” she told me, “he wanted to be around kids.”

I’ve thought a lot about that as I’ve watched the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, stand up against the worst imaginable horror, and thenstand up against the worst organized conservatism can throw at them. This should be a frenetic, happy time. There are sports playoffs and theater production and prom season is right around the corner. Kids should be excited about college acceptances and scholarship possibilities. They shouldn’t be going to this many funerals. They shouldn’t have to be the vanguard in the fight against this country’s insane attraction to its firearms. They didn’t volunteer to be victims, but they sure as hell volunteered to be warriors.

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Outside of the indecent algae like Jim Hoft, much of the reaction to what the kids are doing from the “grown-ups” of the right has been utterly hilarious. Ben Shapiro, who literally has been wrapped in wingnut welfare swaddling since he was their age, has been tut-tutting the country about taking the emotional and immature reaction of these students too seriously. In National Review, Shapiro, who had a syndicated column when he was 17, had the brass-balled audacity to write,

“What, pray tell, did these students do to earn their claim to expertise?”

High-larious, I tells ya.

But the real high comedy has been to watch the conservative intelligentsia embark on a serious fool’s errand—namely, trying to battle with educated teenagers on social media. I mean, don’t any of these people have kids between the ages of 10 and 20? This is like the Redcoats marching back to Boston from Lexington and Concord. They’re taking fire from behind every tree and every stonewall, and they’re getting slaughtered on platforms they’ve probably never heard of.

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I was initially skeptical about whether or not Parkland was going to matter any more in the long run than Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Las Vegas mattered. A lot of that has melted away. This may be a sea change in the issue. There’s a natural savvy at work here from kids who have spent the last few years creating communities on their laptops and phones. Now, instead of communities dedicated to TV shows, music, sports, fashion, and who’s zoomin’ who in fourth-period Bio, the communities being created are being created to design ongoing political action on an issue that literally was life and death a week ago.

This is how the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement, got themselves going in the media Stone Age. It can happen faster now, and it can spread around the world, and these kids know that better than anyone else does.

This is how the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement, got themselves going in the media Stone Age.

My father worked in what were then called “inner-city” schools. When he left the classroom—he actually taught fourth-period Bio—he became the vice-principal on whom disciplinary matters fell. He was notably tough, but he also was a realist. He had a running feud with one phys-ed teacher whose class was scheduled for the first thing in the morning. He kept sending kids who fell asleep down to my father’s office. The first thing my father asked them was whether or not they had had anything to eat that morning. If the answer was no, he’d give them some money and send them to a diner down the street. Then, he’d wait for the gym teacher to come down and yell at him. “Charlie,” he once told me, “You can’t teach a hungry child. It’s pointless.”

I don’t know how my father would have reacted to the kids from Florida. Mass murder wasn’t part of the curriculum in his day. I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t be down with walking out of class in protest. But I’m also fairly sure that, as they went out the door, he’d have slipped them a couple of bucks for lunch.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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