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kurtpankau 's review for:
#NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line
by David Hogg, Lauren Hogg
Dear. God. I don't even know how to review this.
No, there's not a play-by-play of the shooting. David and Lauren Hogg do recount their experiences of that day, but they spent all their time hiding. The visceral portrayals are, rather, of their grief after the fact--particularly Lauren's.
And yeah, the writing is sometimes wooden and uneven because it feels like it was written by a couple of kids. Because it was. On the other hand, the raw honesty on display is breathtaking. You get a real feeling for who these kids are and why the shooting mobilized them--particularly David. And you get a broader sense of the generation they're part of, for whom active-shooter drills are so common that they're joked about. In one gut-wrenching section, someone texts her friends that there's a shooter on campus and gets replies of "OMG, very funny" because this has been normalized to the point that people just tell jokes about it.
Learning more about the younger generation was a huge takeaway for me. I'm a Gen-X-er. We were the idealistic individualists who realized we were hopelessly outnumber and just sort of gave up. These kids, though. Part of me wants to get all grumpy-old-man about them having "TV Production" class in high school, but they live in a world of video essays, so I guess it only makes sense.
The last two chapters are what just kicked me in the heart, though. The penultimate chapter is "The Parkland Manifesto" and talks about how the (uniquely American) epidemic of school shootings has persisted because of learned helplessness on the part of everyday Americans and David Hogg has our number there. See the Gen-X thing above. He outlines a policy agenda for common sense gun legislation and an action plan that ends with "Vote."
It's good to be reminded that the post-Columbine generation who have never known life without school shootings are going to be old enough to vote soon. I suspect that many of them will be motivated, single-issue voters.
The final chapter is just a list of victims of school shootings since Columbine. Needless and preventable murders. Many of the them are my own kids' age.
No, there's not a play-by-play of the shooting. David and Lauren Hogg do recount their experiences of that day, but they spent all their time hiding. The visceral portrayals are, rather, of their grief after the fact--particularly Lauren's.
And yeah, the writing is sometimes wooden and uneven because it feels like it was written by a couple of kids. Because it was. On the other hand, the raw honesty on display is breathtaking. You get a real feeling for who these kids are and why the shooting mobilized them--particularly David. And you get a broader sense of the generation they're part of, for whom active-shooter drills are so common that they're joked about. In one gut-wrenching section, someone texts her friends that there's a shooter on campus and gets replies of "OMG, very funny" because this has been normalized to the point that people just tell jokes about it.
Learning more about the younger generation was a huge takeaway for me. I'm a Gen-X-er. We were the idealistic individualists who realized we were hopelessly outnumber and just sort of gave up. These kids, though. Part of me wants to get all grumpy-old-man about them having "TV Production" class in high school, but they live in a world of video essays, so I guess it only makes sense.
The last two chapters are what just kicked me in the heart, though. The penultimate chapter is "The Parkland Manifesto" and talks about how the (uniquely American) epidemic of school shootings has persisted because of learned helplessness on the part of everyday Americans and David Hogg has our number there. See the Gen-X thing above. He outlines a policy agenda for common sense gun legislation and an action plan that ends with "Vote."
It's good to be reminded that the post-Columbine generation who have never known life without school shootings are going to be old enough to vote soon. I suspect that many of them will be motivated, single-issue voters.
The final chapter is just a list of victims of school shootings since Columbine. Needless and preventable murders. Many of the them are my own kids' age.