#single child raised by a single father. a gunman who taught her how to shoot so she could protect herself

[orcelito]

i've seen ppl talking about Meryl & how little we know about her family, but the geo-plant arc of trigun chapters 10-12 gives us some really useful pieces of info, i think

first, we see her thinking of herself as Cold Blooded, just like the dude that wanted Badwick to kill his own parents

[ID: Meryl stands with her gun drawn and a troubled expression on her face as she thinks to herself, "Exactly as you described him... the cold-blooded type..." In the next panel, she closes her eyes and wonders, "Am I really... any different?" End ID]

at the start of this arc, Milly wrote one of her massive letters to her family, while Meryl mentioned not knowing what she would write to hers. then we see Milly get PISSED at Badwick after she learns he threatened his parents at gunpoint, which leads to this page:

[ID: Meryl, held back by Milly, tells her, "Milly... I envy you... My father would have wanted me to get justifiably angry at a person who points a gun at his parents. That is an important thing." She flashes back to the moment in the chapter before where Milly is attempting to punch the son, Badwick. Milly calls in concern, "Ma'am?" Meryl continues, "But I... I just stood there and took it all in without even budging. I am such a cold person. I chose this path of blood and tears without thinking about the rest of my life. All I can see is what is right in front of me." The page shows the face of the father, dressed in basic battle gear, who is watching silently. Now in tears, Meryl laments, "Why could I not see... that when I closed myself off to him, something was wrong? I..." In the last panel, Milly stares down at Meryl in surprise as Meryl slaps her own cheeks and exclaims, "No... Nevermind!" End ID]

this entire situation is obviously striking something in Meryl's heart. some kind of insecurity she has about her distant relationship with her own parents. she shakes herself out of it, determined to not fall into a funk, and then jumps into defense of the land.

after the battle's over & the father's fallen to his ass, we see these pages:

[ID: In the first page, the father, off screen, tells Meryl and Milly, "There are no words to express how thankful I am for your help." Meryl replies with a smile, "Ah. There's no need." The father goes on to tell her, "Ms. Meryl... I know it was rude of me, but I overheard your conversation earlier. Having raised that rebellious son, I don't know if I have the right thing to say, but... All people are different, but the bonds between parents and children are inseparable. It is a great burden, but also the most precious thing in the world..." In the second page, the father concludes, "... Choose your own path, and walk it with confidence. All of life... is connected. You must live your own life, and your parents will love through you." As he speaks, we see Meryl listening to him with a surprised expression. End ID]

this entire arc feels like a metaphor for Meryl's own situation. after these pages, we see Badwick turning in the deed, then finding out that his parents were entrusting the property to him after all. he's the problem son, someone who separated himself from his parents due to his disagreements with them (likely stemming from his dead younger brother). yet at the end of the day, his parents still love him and entrusted their life's work to him.

Meryl sees all this go down, hears these words, and it touches something in her heart. so we see her go from talking about writing to her family like this in chapter 10:

[ID: A single panel of Meryl with her eyes closed and a peaceful expression on her face. She tells Milly, "That would be the normal thing to do... especially when I've been away from home for so long. But I don't know what to write beyond 'it's dry'..." End ID]

to this bit at the end of chapter 12:

[ID: Meryl approaches a mailbox with luggage in hand. She slips a letter inside, then sighs with a smile. Milly yells, "Maa'aam! What are you doing?! We're already late!" To which Meryl replies, "Ok! Ok! Ok! I'm coming!" End ID]

the experience was enough for her to accept that she might not be the closest with her parents (or just father? considering she only ever mentions a father in this all), but it's still worth reaching out even if she doesn't have much to say.

this arc is the most we see about Meryl's backstory in the manga, but I think we can draw a few things from it. we have a definite mention of a father, but no others. no mention of siblings or any other family members. she's distant from her father, too busy following her heart & goals, but she doesn't have a bad relationship with him. just Distant. she feels disconnected from him, even Cold, for her focus on her work & the practicalities in front of her. but even with that disconnect, she still cares enough about him to feel guilty when she realizes she's been doing this.

and then considering later, when we see the flashback of a man giving her the gun... i'd assumed that was possibly a senior at her work (probably tristamp giving me that perception, from Roberto), but keeping all the rest of this in mind... it really could have been her father.

i went looking to try to find that part. did not find that one exactly, but i DID find this one from trimax chapter 34:

[ID: A nearly bald man with a kind face and what appear to be shooting ear muffs around his neck tells Meryl, "Consider guns delicate. Women, most of all, should make use of them. One shot will level the playing field between you and a big, strong man." End ID]

if this is indeed her father, it would explain why she knows how to shoot like she does. perhaps her father taught her as she was growing up out of the wish to help her protect herself. maybe they weren't incredibly close, but he still clearly cared about her & wanted what was best for her and her safety. the kind of father that's content to let her do whatever her heart wishes, since her happiness is his happiness.

and then chapter 12 ends with this page:

[ID: A black framed page with a single panel at the center. The panel shows Meryl from behind, running with her luggage in hand. The text boxes to the sides state, "All of life is connected by a river... And the beginning of the river... is now." End ID]

she continues on her own path, not looking back, but she is still connected to the ones in her heart... including her father.

(Manga panels referenced from @trigun-manga-overhaul !)

[adambstingus]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182923245687

[samanthasroberts]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

Source: http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

[allofbeercom]

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

[tortuga-aak]

What we know about the victims of the Texas church shooting

AP Photo/Darren Abate

Details about the victims in Sunday's shooting at a church in Texas continue to emerge.

The victims spanned generations, ranging in age from an unborn child to a 77-year-old.

At least eight members of a single family were killed.

At least 26 people were killed and more than 20 others were injured on Sunday when a man walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and started shooting.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called the massacre the deadliest in state history.

The victims spanned generations. The youngest killed was an unborn child. Details of the victims have emerged as relatives of the deceased speak out. Here are some of their stories:

The Holcombe family

Facebook

At least eight members of a single family died in the attack.

Joe Holcombe said his granddaughter-in-law, Crystal Holcombe, died along with her unborn child and three of her children, 13-year-old Greg, 11-year-old Emily, and 8-year-old Megan.

Joe also said that his grandson, Marc Daniel Holcombe, 36, and his infant daughter Noah, died. Joe's son, 60-year-old Bryan Holcombe and his 58-year-old wife Karla Holcombe were also killed.

The Ward family

Facebook

Joann Ward and two of her daughters, 5-year-old Brooke and 7-year-old Emily Garza, were killed, Dallas News reported. A third child — 5-year-old Ryland — was shot and treated at a hospital. Ryland emerged in stable condition after undergoing surgery. He is expected to survive.

Annabelle Pomeroy

Facebook Annabelle Pomeroy, the 14-year-old daughter of one of the church's pastors, was killed along with many friends, according to her mother. Sherri Pomeroy said she and her husband were out of town when the shooting took place. Her father Frank described Annabelle as "one very beautiful, special child."

Richard and Therese Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez and his wife Therese also died. Both of them were retired. Richard's only daughter, Regina, told The Washington Post that her father "was the person I went to if I had a problem."

"He taught me how to love. I didn't call anybody else but him. And now I can't even call him."

Karen and Scott Marshall

This was the Marshall couple's very first visit to the First Baptist Church. The Washington Post reported that Karen was planning to retire from the Air Force and was in the middle of moving from Washington to Texas.

Lula Woicinski White

White was the grandmother of the gunman's wife. She was 71.

"My sister was a wonderful, caring person — a God-loving person," Mary Mishler Clyburn told the New York Daily News. "I miss her badly already. We texted every day. We loved each other to the moon and back."

Robert and Shani Corrigan

The Detroit Free Press reported that the Corrigans were Michigan natives. They were high school sweethearts. The two had moved to rural Texas to start a new life years ago.

"[Robert] was always a gentleman — never judging who you were or where you came from. He treated everyone equally," said Patty Root, a longtime family friend. "We will miss him. And everyone needs to know what a fine man he grew up to be. He did not come from a rich family — just a family that loved to help others."

Tara McNulty

Facebook One of her best friends, Amber Maricle, messaged McNulty after hearing news about the shooting. In a text, she remarked how "the shooting was so close to [Tara]," without knowing that she was caught up in it, according to The Washington Post.

Haley Krueger

GoFundMe A family friend of Haley's set up a GoFundMe campaign online to raise money for her surviving family.

Her friend describes Haley as "a beautiful, vibrant, 16-year-old girl, and was excited about the bright future ahead of her. She loved babies, and had dreams of becoming a NICU nurse. In her mother’s words 'Haley loved life and was the most dramatic person.'"

Other victims

Details about some of the other victims are still beginning to surface. Dennis and Sara Johnson were killed. Their family confirmed their deaths but declined to comment further, The Washington Post reported.

ABC News reported that Peggy Warden, 56, Keith Allen Braden, 62, and Emily Garcia, 7, also died.

A CNN reporter tweeted the full list of victims who died:

Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/928320556012834816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The full list of Texas church shooting victims was released today via @CNN. http://pic.twitter.com/5iKRZGCBlC

NOW WATCH: Trump says the Texas church shooting 'isn't a guns situation' — watch his full statement on the attack that killed 26 people

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