If I had a daughter, I would want her to be little like Emma Gonzalez.
Or perhaps a lot like her.
There are a hundred reasons. There is her buzz cut for starters. As a woman who used to shave her head I promise you, bringing a set of clippers to your scalp is a statement, bold as brass.
There is her voice, honest and loud and cracked through with emotion. She is passionate and raw and real and as ragged around the edges as the shredded jeans she sports.
But as I watched her stand in silence for the better part of six minutes, shutting her eyes against what must have been a groundswell of emotion from both within and without, what struck me — or more accurately smacked me around the head with a 2 x 4 — was the ferocity with which she embraces her tears.
Emma Gonzalez keeps allowing us a window into her heart, and by doing so, she is normalizing the act of crying. By refusing to hide her anger and rage and grief but instead allowing us a front row seat to those tears, she is telling us it is ok.
It is ok to cry.
Because really, we should all be weeping.
We teach our American boys to man up, be strong, grow a pair. We teach those sons to suppress and repress and deny. We teach them to show emotion is shameful and weak. We decry boys and men who do show emotion as pussies, as feminine, as damaged and less than.
Crying is for girls, our boys are told. Which has somehow unmistakably become synonymous with weakness.
We teach our sons that boys don’t cry. We teach them that real men do not feel.
Except that boys do cry. And men do feel.
Why? Because they are human, and this is what humans do. We feel. That ability along with opposable thumbs, that’s all that’s really separating us from our red-assed, chest-thumping ancestors.
You can’t keep suppressing something as natural as emotion. You know what happens? All of those pent-up feelings explode outward. In a fist connecting with a cheekbone, or a crowbar to a window, or a spray of bullets.
It’s a fucked-up crazy upside-down world when we demonize tears and normalize rage.
Humans feel. We cry. Out of sadness or fear or pain or rage or frustration, of joy or happiness or pleasure. Crying is nothing if not a reboot for the soul.
We should all be weeping.
Yet we keep encouraging our boys not to. And by default, our girls. Because as women we know firsthand that a show of emotion will be held against us, used against us, a black mark against our souls when it is time to have our hearts weighed and measured.
And then here comes Emma Gonzalez and her tears.
Perhaps if we encouraged more crying things would be different. We might be sopping up tears, but perhaps we wouldn’t be cleaning up so much blood from classroom floors.
Maybe if we encouraged more weeping, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time figuring out why all that pent-up emotion with nowhere to go then explodes like an active volcano, taking the rest of us with it in its red-hot wake.
I spent a long time after the last US election in a pit of fiery rage. It took me a long time to understand that rage was a finger in the dike, holding my grief inside. I knew if I let that grief out, it would sweep me away. It would knock me under and drag me out in its undertow and spin me until I didn’t know which way was up and which down.
I was terrified of showing my vulnerability. I was terrified because I knew it would be held against me. It would be seen as a weakness, held over my head like a Damoclean sword.
It took me even longer to understand that vulnerability, far from being a weakness, is one of a woman’s most powerful strengths. Because it allows me to feel. And to grow and learn and manage and channel and adapt and change and live.
We should all be weeping. At the world we’re fucking up. At the blood stained floors and the hate-fueled mess we are creating. We should be weeping with the mothers and fathers who have lost their sons and daughters, over the children who are washing up dead on foreign beaches, with the brothers and sisters who are being shot and killed for nothing more than being black at the wrong time, with the people across a globe being bombed into oblivion.
We should all be weeping.
Yes, if I had a daughter, I would want her to be a little and a lot like Emma Gonzalez.
But I do not have a daughter. I have sons. But I have sons who will grow up unafraid to express emotion. Who will be encouraged to cry and fear and feel. Sons who will watch me cry and rage and feel. Because how else do we teach our children to embrace their feelings — all of them — sadness and anger and fear and joy — how do we teach them what to do with those emotions if they do not see us experiencing — and surviving them?
Emma Gonzalez’s tear streaked face is a symbol. Not of weakness, but of strength and determination. And yes, of vulnerability.
We should all take a page out of Gonzalez’s book. We should all be weeping.
This post first appeared on Medium. I’d be grateful if you’d give it some love over there.
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Wine and Cheese (Doodles) 
Dina—
I echo your thoughts.
The level of how impressed Emma Gonzalez makes me feel….I can’t adequately express it. To feel so much admiration and love for a child I’ve never met might surprise some people, but I suspect you get it.
Emma is amazing in her bravery, strength, and conviction. At a time when many who’ve endured what she’s faced would be curled up in a ball in a darkened safe space (understandably so), she’s stood in front of a barrage of slings and arrows—most from adults.
I, too, have sons. Also a grandson. But just before the last presidential election I gained a granddaughter. She’s what saved me after election night. After tears and fury, and heartache I didn’t know I could feel over an election, she’s been a key motivation (on top of a lifetime of feminism) to march in DC and Indianapolis, attend organizational meetings, subscribe to newspapers, financially support progressives in office and new candidates gearing up for 2018 and 2020, and stay informed to an even greater degree.
That poster “I Can’t Believe I’m Still Fighting the Same Shit” applies to most of what I do, but Emma and her peers are fighting a new battle. One I never had to deal with. Working in a school, and also as a concert- and movie theater-goer, the increasing concerns about gun violence in public spaces are scary. How the actions of those who use guns to inflict terror in our communities and how they are changing the way we think and act in public spaces is even scarier. We’re seeing a sea change similar to what the 9/11 crashes did to air travel. While no one enjoys all the shit that rained down since that, something HAS to change.
Those who trot out the “Guns don’t kill people…” or that they should be able to own whatever gun they want are arguing that protecting gun right matters above all, and that the US [throw up hands] just can’t fix this problem. Never mind that others have found solutions.
I don’t have the answers how to fix this —yet I can’t see how maintaining individual rights to own weapons that discharge high frequency / high quantity rounds is necessary or part of the solution. I hope the ending of that becomes part of the legacy of the movement our young people are leading.
Meanwhile, Emma—Fight On. ❤️✊🏼✊🏾✊🏿✊🏻
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I don’t know that any of us have all the answers, or the perfect answer, but I know that we all need to keep striving to find them. And what works today may not hold up, it might not work in five months or five years or fifty. But we cannot keep pretending like burying our heads in the sand is going to do anything, because it’s not. These “kids” have only ever known gun massacres. They are the kids who grew up post-Columbine. They are Generation PTSD.
It breaks my heart into a million pieces, but then someone like Emma comes along and sweeps up a few of them.
Maybe, just maybe, by the end of it all it will be back in working order. Both society and my heart.
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i agree
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This is excellent. The days of boys and men not showing emotion because it makes them “weak” should have died years ago. I applaud and admire any male who allows his true emotions to shine through. I believe it to be a sign of strength, not of weakness. When you start to hide who you are and what you feel, that is when trouble starts…when the anger and rage and other negative emotions take over. Thank you for teaching your boys to “feel.” You are giving them a great gift for life.
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It IS a sign of strength, and it is so important to feel a range of emotions and to feel safe enough to express those emotions.
How else can we grow? How else can we do anything if the only emotion we allow boys/men are the extremes?
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Reblogging to sister site Success Inspirers World
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The Parkland kids have made me cry over and over again in the last weeks. I’m thankful to them for that. Yes, for the grief I’m expressing. Also for the hope and beauty and power and courage and calm they show us. I’m so flat-out thankful for these kids – they say everything I want to say and they make me think maybe it isn’t all over for us after all.
My daughter was at the D.C. march and saw all those speakers up close and personal. AND SAW LIN MANUEL PERFORM ON STAGE. I’m thrilled for her to have been present at that historic moment. Scratch that – this is not a moment; it’s a movement.
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There really is a Hamilton reference for everything :-).
They are something to watch, and it makes me have hope, that the country I thought existed IS there, just taking a little bit longer to catch up than I thought.
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