Amanda Gorman, Hours After a Horrific School Shooting, Spoke for a Generation

Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate and the youngest inaugural poet ever in the United States, blew minds in January of 2o21 with her poem “The Hill We Climb” about the Capitol insurrection that left five dead.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

Gorman, 24 and wise beyond her years, has a very special way of cutting through to the heart of a problem with just a few words. And today, just hours after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that left 21 dead (including 18 children), she penned a gutting new poem about the tragedy.

Gorman continued on Twitter:

Gorman speaks for a generation. While the federal government has found it impossible to garner the support to pass very basic laws regulating guns, even after 20 children and six adults died in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, nearly seven in 10 people under 30 support gun control laws, according to a Harvard University poll. Perhaps because Millennials and Zoomers have been subjected to active shooter drills for years. Oxford High School in suburban Detroit had one such drill the month before four students died in a mass shooting there:

CNN spoke with students who recalled arming themselves with scissors and calculators in case the suspect entered their classrooms. They worked together to turn off the lights, bolt the doors shut, and turn their desks into a barricade.

The United States has had exponentially more mass shootings than literally any other country in the world, and research points directly to the amount of guns we have here:

Gorman, who was raised by a single mom in Los Angeles and went on to transfix the nation at President Biden’s inauguration at only 22 years old, is not an elected official. She does not have the power to write or vote on a bill banning assault weapons, nor anything for that matter. But she has 1.5 million Twitter followers and an exceptional way with words, and she is using her platform to say exactly what America needs to hear right now. I hope enough people are listening.