2018: The Year The Children Did Lead Us

God bless them, every one.

The kindergartners are having active shooter drills. They are hiding in the closets, crying and messing their pants. We traumatize them every day, to keep them "safe." But what should we do, NOT teach our babies to rush the bad man? (Yes. We should not teach our babies to rush the bad man.)

For years now, Moms Demand and Everytown for Gun Safety and Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Astronaut Mark have been trying to save America from itself -- to change it from the kind of country that lets forty-seven of its children get shot with guns EVERY DAY. To change it from the kind of nation that doesn't even charge the adults who leave their guns around their children, who then do the utterly expected. And we watch and wish it could be different, but the NRA is too powerful, there is nothing we can do, we might as well just lie down and die, in a shower of lead.

But the Parkland kids -- they would NOT BE IGNORED, DAN. They are fierce and powerful and FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, and as they start college -- they're barely in college! -- they are dragging the rest of us along for a master class in ENOUGH, while it's the NRA that is weakened and dying. 

In March, we drove from Montana to DC to kiss the children on their beautiful faces. We gave them IMPEACH hats, and bought 'spensive pizzas, and we wept. The old black lady wept. The old white man with the cauliflower nose sobbed. My husband pretended he did not cry, but he cried. We were there only to back them up. They have made this fight, they have done the work, they have grown up in a hot fucking second through no choice of their own. They needed to know that we -- so wishy-washy in our middle-age, so sure the NRA was unbeatable and that we CAN'T -- were changed by their fury, just as they were.

This is what I wrote then, when you, our readers, sent us there in our ridiculous RV:

But we can have their backs -- the 88-year-old man on the train whose sign said OLD PEOPLE VOTE EVERY SINGLE TIME, and all the middle-aged mothers like me, and the husbands who cherish their children but for real, not like how Donald Trump "cherishes" a woman. And there are so many of us, so many millions, and we will vote, and we will end our nation's insane bloodlust at the ballot box. I have never felt more hope and joy -- okay, the morning after Obama's election, but that's the ONLY time in my 45 years when there was such a clarity of goodness in our nation's collective heart.

My mom was born in Hawaii, and is the same age as Obama's mother, so she feels like he is her child too -- the child of her entire generation. I feel the same way about these marvelous, brave, beautiful teens. They're all of ours, they belong to us.

And we will do this for them, and we will do it behind them, will have their goddamn backs for once, because our babies are FUCKING MAGNIFICENT.

And November came, and for once I was right.

Thank you for being our friend.