I have a message to all the pundits who are angrily opposing the Parkland survivors’ growing movement: they are not paying any attention to you. And it’s for good reason.
You can call it irony or call it hypocricy. But when a person castigates the teenagers of this country for “bullying” a student one week, and then proceeds to mercilessly attack them the next? It’s disgusting. Simply because they don’t ideologically agree with you, you switch immediately to spiteful rhetoric and sardonic memes — if that isn’t bullying, then I don’t know what is.
And it’s both cowardly and predictable to hide behind some phony anti-bullying agenda after decades of preaching the merits of accountibility and responsibility for one’s own actions. The hypocricy is palpable. Because it’s so obviously a ruse to distract any sort of attention from your real interest, which is clearly the hallowed 2nd amendment.
But nobody really cares about the 2nd ammendment itself, do they? Nor do they care about bullying or parenting or mental health. The root of this is a selfish addiction people have to clinging to their firearms. They hide behind the 2nd ammendment as a convenient excuse to falsify that it’s an issue of “freedom.” But this was never about the constitution, and it was never about bullying. So it’s time to stop making excuses and lying to these kids, and admit that your only real concern is holding onto your weapons.
These teenagers don’t care about your weapons, and they certainly don’t care about your feelings. They have nothing to fear from you, because they know what true fear is. The kids at Parkland watched their classmates and friends get shot and die, and every one of them thought they’d be next. And given that most teenagers believe they’re invincible, that is a serious feat.
Talk show hosts and hateful memes and social media politicians? These things are a joke to them. Flip flopping your empathy by calling THEM the bullies now and victimizing the shooter himself? These things merely motivate and enrage them further.
Challenge these kids at your own risk — you will lose. Because while conservatives have been pissing in the wind about how much better things were in the “good ol’ days,” they’ve been busy adapting to the world as it is. And while they were irrationally bitching about being stripped of their rights and sharing counterfactual memes in right wing echo chambers — these kids became far better equipped to challenge and destroy these antiquated belief systems than anyone could have ever imagined.
We raised these children. They reap what we’ve sewn. So if your greatest fear in this modern world is sensible gun regulations, then be afraid. Because despite popular belief, the government is not programming these kids’ movement. However, their movement will soon be programming our government. And the stubborn platitudes worshipped by the alt right are going to fade out of sight like a tiny burst of gunpowder.