This is just the beginning

I am standing on the stage in Old Town Square, looking out at over two thousand students and hundreds more of community members. I’ve been here countless times. Old Town is the most interesting place in Fort Collins for a high schooler who has lived here all her life and is only a year away from moving away for the first time. I’ve had Ben and Jerry’s on the little blue chairs with my best friend, sat at CooperSmith’s with my family and watched little kids squeal as they ran through the water.

Now, the only vision I will ever be able to picture of the space is standing in front of two thousand students, holding a sign that read “Alex Schachter”, and watching as every single person raised their hands to make a heart. I will remember the tears I fought back and the fact that every one of those two thousand students left school that Tuesday afternoon because they were scared of the world they were growing up in. I will remember walking 2.6 miles from Poudre High School, down the middle of the intersection of College and Mountain, chanting “show me what democracy looks like” and hearing hundreds echo back “this is what democracy looks like.”

I will remember that, for all the memories, for all the hugs we gave each other that day, for every single poster we laughed together over creating, there was a student who was lost to senseless gun violence in a public school. I will remember that the fact that we made CBS and Fox news means nothing if legislators don’t hear our voices. I will remember the panic I felt when I got sent a pass from the deans the day before the walkout, and how that panic is not even a sliver of what runs through a student’s mind when the loudspeaker echoes with “Code 99 Lockdown”.

I spent hours the weekend before the walkout making posters, running a social media campaign, and meeting with my fellow organizers to establish how we would pull off such a massive event. I was surrounded by the most passionate, driven, intelligent, and honest teenagers I had ever met. Every single one of them gave up sleep, time with friends and family, and risked getting hateful messages from people who didn’t agree with or work to understand the cause. They inspire me beyond belief, and none of us are slowing down.

The walkout was an incredible step in mobilizing students. It reminded high schoolers that they have more of a say than they think, allowed them to channel their anger and their sadness and their fear into a very real event. But what comes next is just as important. What comes next is the town halls. The school district board meetings. The March for Our Lives. The conversations that are calm and reasoned, but recognize a very immediate need for reform.

I did not cry when I heard of the shooting in Parkland, Florida. I did not cry as my fellow organizers and I ran over lists of school shootings around the nation, and I did not cry as we planned how to write the phrase, “am I next?” on a poster big enough to see across the square. Becoming numb to the world around you becomes easier as more awful things occur. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you are somehow flawed. It simply means that you are scared, and the hardest part is that we as students have reason to be.

The moment in which I cried was when I was asked to make the poster for the final victim of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. When I went to print a picture of Peter Wang, I came across tens of news stories on the fact that he was a member of MSD’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). I learned that Wang, at fifteen years old, held the door open at his school so others could escape with their lives. I learned that he had dreamed of attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point since he was young. And in this boy, younger than I am now, I saw the high schooler in each one of us who has dreams. The one who wants to protect those around them, the one who does the best that they can in the face of stress and heartbreak and everything life throws their way. Peter Wang lost his life protecting other human beings, and that resonated with me. It made me decide that I will fight as long as it takes to make schools safe for students. It made me recognize the desperate need for change in this country, where school shootings are an almost everyday occurrence.

Without that change, the shootings don’t stop. The way mental health is regarded in the United States certainly requires reform. Students and adults alike deserve access to care that will make things easier on them. But that’s not the solution. Nor is arming teachers, not when simulation after simulation has demonstrated that doing so harms innocent students. We are not calling for complete gun restrictions, but we are calling for laws that regulate gun ownership to only those who can prove their responsibility and their need for them. We are calling for nationwide recognition that student lives are worth more than guns are. We are calling because after the walkout, I held the hand of a little girl who was shaking because of the counter protesters wielding drawings of guns that appeared in the square. We are calling because guns do not belong in schools, and because questions of safety should not have to be asked in schools, and because fear does not belong in schools. We are calling so that we are heard, and the walkout was just the beginning.