At the March for Our Lives, Registering the Next Generation of Voters

My six-year-old son is the early riser in our house, and on Saturday morning he is surprised to discover that I am already awake and getting dressed. He crawls into bed beside his father, who is dozing, and watches me pull a t-shirt over my head.

“Where are you going?” he wants to know.

He is aware that there is a march today, but we have sheltered him from the details. He does not know what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, just as he has not yet heard of Sandy Hook. He knows Chicago because of the Cubs, and he has visited the aquarium in Baltimore, where for an entire afternoon we observed the dreamlike movements of blue and yellow fish. But he does not know that children in those cities die regularly from gun violence.

Which is why I am deliberately vague in my response. I tell him that I am on my way downtown to meet up with some other mothers, and that I am going to help register people to vote.

I expect more questions but he just watches me in the light from the bathroom. He is learning to read and I know that he is trying to decipher the writing on my t-shirt. He is at the point where he sounds out most words, letter-by-letter, but there are words he already recognizes by sight: dog, ball, book. As I bend down to kiss him goodbye, he asks me why my shirt says gun.

*

My husband and I had briefly considered attending the march with our children. It is the March for Our Lives, after all, and their lives hang squarely in the balance. But my son’s kindergarten teacher recently told me that none of the students in his class appear to be aware of mass shootings as a phenomenon, and so we have decided to keep him in the dark for as long as we can.

His teacher agreed that this was a good call. Last fall, when the school did its lockdown drills, one of the children had asked what might be lurking in the hallways. The class had reached the general consensus of zombies and wild dogs, and his teacher’s voice caught a little as he told me this.

*

My son knows that I don’t like guns. He is old enough to understand my objections in general terms but still too young for me to explain the particular devastation bullets cause to the human body.

It will be years before I explain to him, or to his younger sister, that I have seen that devastation firsthand. In 1996, as an archeologist on forensic investigations in eastern Bosnia, I exhumed mass graves and helped pathologists conduct autopsies in which gunshot wounds were the cause of death. Twenty-two years later, I carry in my head a mental photograph of a femur, the victim so young that the shaft had not yet attached to its cap of bone.

*

A group of teenage girls sits across from me on the Metro, which is still largely empty at 7:45 in the morning. I close my eyes and pretend not to listen in on their conversation. I estimate that they are fourteen and fifteen because one of them has just received her learner’s permit and the others are audibly jealous. Another is complaining about one of her teachers. A third tells her friends that she has never liked the shape of her nose.

The conductor announces that trains will bypass McPherson Square, and there is a little ripple in their group. One girl goes to take a look at the map at the end of the car.

I wonder briefly if I should offer advice with directions. I open my eyes and look over at them, taking in their leggings and home-made signs. But they are already figuring it out and, besides, something tells me to maintain my distance. Part of me wants to let them have this experience, free from adult influence, but perhaps part of me is also ashamed. After all, they live in the world my generation could not change for them.

The train pulls into the next station. The doors open. And like a group of determined yearlings, they go.

*

At 8:30 am, I reach the Georgetown University Law Center, where volunteer training for voter registration is taking place. The auditorium is packed, but directly in front of me is another mother I know. My son and her daughter were in the same preschool class last year and we are both recent members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense. It is because of their call for volunteers that we are here.

There is palpable excitement in the group, which numbers in the hundreds. Volunteers of all ages have come from all over the country. They occupy every seat and spill into the aisles. I chat with the woman sitting on the floor next to me and she tells me that she had driven down from Worcester, Massachusetts, the day before.

We are ready and raring to go, but first there are speakers and instructions on how to interact with prospective voters. We are given information about registration laws, which vary by state, and still more volunteers hand out lanyards and clipboards, stickers and t-shirts. Headcount, which has organized the registration drive, urges us to work in pairs, and so Noel, the other mother, and I team up.

Outside, we walk down E Street in the early spring sunshine, surrounded on all sides by groups of teenagers, families, elderly couples, all of them headed to the march. From Indiana Avenue, we catch sight of Pennsylvania Avenue, the venue for the march. It is already a sea of people and the side-streets are filling by the second, thousands of posters held aloft.

We station ourselves on Indiana Plaza, beside Pennsylvania Avenue and not far from one of the screens. We climb onto a low stone wall, next to a tulip magnolia in full bloom.

*

Our success is limited at first as most people are intent on getting as close to the rally as they can. Corrals have been set up on Pennsylvania Avenue, behind us, and there are safety checkpoints onto the route. In the beginning, the people we talk to are primarily interested in knowing about the checkpoints, and the location of the portable toilets.

“Voter registration over here!” we shout. We call out to people passing by. “Are you registered to vote at your current address?”

People nod.

We get a lot of, “You bet I’m registered to vote.” And, “I can’t wait to vote.” And, “I’ve voted in every election for the past forty years.

Finally, two teenage girls approach us. 2018 will be their first election.

*

We get better at it with time. Eye contact is critical and so is smiling. Most people our age and older are already registered, and we have better luck with groups of teenagers. This makes sense. Most of the adults we meet are already politically engaged. But the day has been organized by teenagers, and massive numbers of teenagers have answered the call. Most of them are too young to have voted in previous elections.

We face the crowd, though we are aware of what is taking place on the screen behind us. We hear Samantha Fuentes sing Happy Birthday for Nick Dworet, one of the students killed at Parkland. We register Emma Gonzalez’s silence and we hear fifth-grader Naomi Wadler shame the media for failing to adequately report the murders of black girls and women.

Each time a speaker urges the crowd to vote, we raise our clipboards a little higher.

“Here!” We call. “Register to vote right here!”

*

One young man approaches me with his mother. He is nervous, and polite, and fills out the form with a hand that shakes slightly. He points to his signature and says that he hopes people will be able to read it. I tell him not to worry, that he has printed his name above it, and that my own signature is so messy that even cryptographers would be unable to read my penmanship.

I look up and realize that his mother’s eyes are bright with tears.

She blinks them back and asks me when he can expect to receive confirmation. I understand that, like my own parents, she has emigrated from someplace else. I have the sudden, vivid memory of their pride on the day I first voted, many years ago.

“Four to six weeks,” I manage to tell them.

“Thank you,” the boy says.

But I am too choked up to thank him back.

*

Throughout the day, teenagers are the ones that we register. The laws differ by state. Some allow voter registration at the age of seventeen. Some, like California and Massachusetts, allow pre-registration at sixteen.

Several young people approach to ask if they are old enough. We hand forms to those who are eligible, but must turn others away for being too young.

“Soon,” we tell them.

And it is true. By 2020, all eligible Millenials will be able to vote. All 90 million of them.

*

By the end of the day Noel registers nine new voters, and I register six. They are solid if not overwhelming numbers, but as we turn in our forms we are satisfied. Because of our efforts, fifteen new voters will be able to show up at the polls in November.

Our arms are tired from holding our clipboards aloft, but we have been standing in one place for hours and decide to walk over Memorial Bridge in order to catch the Metro home. Along the way, we admire the blue sky and trade notes on our kids’ first year of kindergarten.

We part ways at the Arlington Cemetery Metro station. As I wait on the platform I blink back tears for the second time today. “In twenty years,” she had told me as we started walking, “I want to be able to tell my children that I did something.”