photo by Fabrice Florin (creative commons)

Last week the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, due to the tragedy of a gunman coming into their school and killing their friends, vowed that their’s would be the last school shooting and they became activists. Instead of sitting back and letting the usual rusty machinery grind away they became enraged. You’ve taken your first step, standing up for the values you believe in. Your path is clear and your motives are pure, and you have idealism and a righteous rage burning in your souls, but at some point temptations will soon be thrown at you in an attempt to alter, skew, or stop your vision. Here are some of the temptations to be on the lookout for.

1) Promises will be made to you by authorities that a compromise now will lead to your goal later, but the compromises will keep coming and the promise never does.

2) Don’t be afraid to be singled out, the forces that oppose you may try to “break off members of the herd” with information meant to disparage and deter you, to lessen your effectiveness in your movement. They wouldn’t do this if they didn’t fear you and what you represent. Stand tall in the storm, smile and don’t let their dismissive, arrogant, condescending and scurrilous attacks stop you. Keep moving forward.

3) Contemporaries will approach you, they will look like you, speak your language, but their goal is to appropriate your message for their own ends, to profit from it, or perhaps to stop it.

4) There will be those that try to co-opt you by pretending to take you seriously and give you a voice, but it’s your integrity they want or to use you as a prop to their agenda. You may even be offered a job to make you a part of their machine.

5) There will be untrue attacks on your integrity (I see there already are), there will be dismissal of you being too young to understand. I see there already have been, ironically from the generation that declared not to trust anyone over 30 and that they will clean up the mistakes of the older generation, and a lot of the hazards have befallen their generation. They just don’t realize you’re the next iteration of what they started.

6) There will be set-backs arranged by those in power. Don’t let losing one battle make you give up on the war.

7) Some of your comrades may fall victim to some of these temptations, don’t feel betrayed, don’t blame them too harshly, they may be seeking security and comfort they’ve missed or believe they’ve sacrificed enough. Don’t be discouraged, they just may not have been as strong as you.

I’m sorry we haven’t done more to prevent the horror that you’ve had to experience but maybe your anger and idealism will demonstrate to those that hold power of their own idealistic roots that drove them to make a change in the world and will embrace your message.

A note to the media: Stop being condescending calling them children or in an interview how articulate they are, you think you’re being supportive, you’re not. It is condescending, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager.