Page 98 - Writes of Passage

from A SPEECH BY EMMA GONZALEZ
We are speaking up for those who don’t have anyone listening to them, for those who can’t talk about it just yet, and for those who will never speak again. We are grieving, we are furious, and we are using our words fiercely and desperately because that’s the only thing standing between us and this happening again.
I knew that . . . we were going to be the people who were going to make that change . . . we were going to be the ones who were going out into Congress and telling them, this is our fight now because you messed it up so badly that you left it to the kids and now it’s our job.
Emma Gonzalez
Emma Gonzalez was eighteen years old when she survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on 14 February 2018. Seventeen students and staff members were killed and seventeen more injured
by a former student. Gonzalez and friends founded the gun control advocacy body Never Again, and, with fellow students, led the March for Our Lives in Washington DC on 24 March 2018, with a turnout of an estimated two million people, one of the largest protests in American history. Among the many speakers – survivors and family of survivors of shootings – Gonzalez spoke and then fell silent for some minutes. She revealed that the time between her starting to speak and the end of the silence was six minutes and twenty seconds – the length of time it took for the victims in her school to be shot.
Gonzalez is proof of what young people can achieve. Though her fight is not over.
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