from Esquire:
WASHINGTON, D.C.—I was walking in the general direction of Capitol Hill on Saturday when I made a call for myself. I’d long since lost track of the people with whom I’d been walking, and the closer we got to Capitol Hill along Pennsylvania Avenue, the thicker the crowds became until it was virtually impossible to see anything at all except the person in front of you and the people on either side. Anyway, being basically trapped, I made the call about which way the reporting of the March For Our Lives was going to go.
No politicians.
Not even the ones I like. Not even the ones with whom I agree. (These groups are not the same, by the way.) Not if they picked me up and carried me around on their shoulders. Not if they came and sat in my lap. No politicians. Not this day. This day was for everybody else and this day was for politicians—all politicians—to take a seat and listen. Because this day was nothing if it was not a massive condemnation of general political malpractice, a case that already had gone to the jury too many times, and a case on which the jury had come back too many times, and now it was the politicians who had to sit there, quietly, and listen to a nation’s victim-impact statement. No, there would be no talking to politicians on Saturday. I didn’t want to distract them from hearing what they needed to hear.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was everywhere in the swelling crowd—students, alumni, teachers and coaches, football jerseys and baseball caps, theater kids and wideouts. The massive turnout was marbled throughout with the people most immediately touched by the country’s most recent massacre. I walked along with Amanda Koplovitz, an MSD senior who, back on Valentine’s Day, had spent several hours in a closet in the theater building across from the freshman building that Nikolas Cruz was turning into a killing ground. She stayed in there for two hours. Amanda had come to Washington with a friend. “This,” she said, gesturing toward the crowd around her, “started almost immediately. We started talking to each other and everything came together like you see.” She still can remember every second of every minute, and every minute of every hour. “I didn’t see my phone for two weeks," she said. “That was the least of my worries, though.”
As I wandered through the crowd, I noticed something else: signs declaring some of the participants in the march to be from the other national stations of the cross. Columbine. Newtown. The Pulse nightclub. Two guys from Northern Illinois University where, on Valentine’s Day in 2008, exactly ten years before Nikolas Cruz walked into the freshman building in Parkland, a student named Steven Kazmierczak opened up on a crowd of his fellow students with a shotgun and three handguns. He killed five people and wounded 17 others before he ended things by killing himself. I’d forgotten that shooting ever happened, which is the kind of amnesiac anesthesia that this march was aimed at preventing. As I turned away and back toward the street, I saw a woman holding a tall metal rod topped with a picture of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
On January 8, 2011, Nancy Bowman, an OR nurse in Tucson, Arizona, needed to buy some milk. So she and her husband, a doctor, drove on down to the Safeway in the Las Toscana Village Mall. As Bowman was walking into the store, a man named Jared Lee Loughner was walking out, a 9 mm. Glock held down by his leg. He walked up to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was having an outdoor meet-and-greet with her constituents in the parking lot of the mall, and he shot her in the head. Then he shot 21 other people, six of them fatally.
“I started taking care of the people, who were down like dominoes,” Bowman recalled. “It took about 45 minutes or so before all the victims were pronounced dead at the scene or were transported to the hospital.
“I didn’t know who I was working on then, but I know them now. People asked how I could work on so many, but they were just lying down there like dominoes. I did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Judge John Roll until my husband came up to me and said, ‘You got to stop. You got to go and save somebody. You can’t save him.' I took care of Pam Simon, who was an aide to Gabby Giffords.” Bowman also worked to save Ron Barber, who later briefly would take Giffords’ seat in the House of Representatives. “I worked on Ron,” Bowman said, “because he was about to bleed to death. I took care of Christina Taylor-Green and the woman who’d brought her there.” Christina Taylor-Green died shortly thereafter. She was nine years old.
“I work in the OR,” said Nancy Bowman, “So I’m very familiar with blood, yes.”
Standing with Bowman was Patricia Maisch. On that terrible day, Maisch actually had come to the mall to see Congresswoman Giffords. She wanted to thank her for voting for the Affordable Care Act and for voting for President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, which had helped Maisch and her husband run their heating and cooling business. She found herself intimately involved with the end of Laughner’s rampage.
“That’s when he ran out of ammunition, and he was trying to reload,” she said. “That’s when two guys, without guns, tackled him. Essentially tackled him on top of me. Because of that, I was able to take a magazine out of his hand that he was trying to reload.”
Most of the attention was on the stage, and that was as it should be. There were no politicians there, either. There was Emma Gonzalez and her mournful, gravid silence, and the great Naomi Wadler, the 11-year-old from Alexandria, Virginia, who said that she was here for a singular purpose.
I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics, instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.
From the stage, it was clear that this event was not only about the victims of massacres, but also the victims of the daily, slow-motion massacre in our cities and out in our rural areas, places shattered by poverty, drug addiction and hopelessness. (It was this that seems to have brought Paul McCartney out in New York, who told CNN that, "One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here, so it's important to me.") Those clips will be played, over and over again, all over television. With any luck at all, they will, anyway.
But my lasting memory of the march will be all these other people—Amanda Koplovitz, the two men from Northern Illinois, Nancy Bowman and Patricia Maisch, and hundreds of others who came here because what happened in Parkland had happened to them, too. In this country now, there is a sprawling community of people who have survived mass murder, a community bound quite literally in blood. There are too many of them. There were too many of them a decade ago. This community is almost certain to get larger. Someday, god help us, the kids from Parkland will march with other survivors in honor of the most recent dead. We certainly are growing an interesting brand of combat veterans here in the United States these days.
