On Valentine’s Day, among the 17 lives taken on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was that of 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff. Alyssa was an accomplished soccer player and a member of the school’s widely respected debate team.
As soon as I saw the news that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had been attacked, my mind immediately went to the debate team. The first time I had ever heard of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was nearly two decades earlier, when I was a student in Florida. The national champion of my particular flavor of debate — mock student congress — was a young man from the school.
In the days that followed the attack, as some students began taking the initiative to speak out on the issue of guns and school safety, I was both heartened and concerned. I didn’t agree with every position or prescription offered up by every student. I worried about the exploitation of students by overzealous advocates in the gun debate. Also, I cringed when television hosts would press grieving students to offer up their stance on “what should be done” in the midst of already difficult interviews about their eyewitness accounts of the shooting. But I was glad to know that some kids were confident that their voice mattered, that they had a right to speak. And I was heartened to know that there were certainly many students who had been prepared, through activities like speech and debate, to thoughtfully and intelligently make the case for their views.
As a delegate to various high school civics and government activities throughout my teenage years — debate tournaments, student congresses, Girls State and Girls Nation — I would often introduce or debate mock legislation. The topics were wide-ranging, but one I remember most vividly is a resolution I drafted urging our leaders to honor our commitment to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. I dutifully clipped and highlighted newspaper articles about things like nuclear deterrence, arms races, and missile defense technology and fashioned arguments that I felt persuasively made the case for preserving the principle of mutually assured destruction that had prevented the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. (A month after my high school graduation, the United States withdrew from the treaty, anyway.)
That was a half my lifetime ago, and I now look back on those arguments and positions with a bit of a chuckle. It is a good thing I was not setting missile-defense policy when I was seventeen; the nuclear threats facing the United States are very different today than they were in 2002 or 1972. Some of the things I believed strongly at age 17 have stuck with me, while others I have completely abandoned. As a teenager, being in debate meant having to form opinions on a whole host of political and policy issues at the same time that I was exploring my own identity and doing the hard work of growing up. I was wrong on many things then, and surely I will look back in a decade or two and have a different point of view on some things I believe strongly now.
All of which is to say that the views of a 17-year-old are by no means necessarily less valid, less interesting, or less worthy of a public airing than are the views of anyone else. Not all teenagers are spending their days reading the Economist like the debate kids might be, but most adults aren’t, either. Spend a weekend volunteering at a debate tournament in your community and you’ll walk away with a brand new perspective on whether someone under the age of 18 might have something valuable to contribute to our national discussion over key issues.
There is a strange tendency in politics to either overvalue or undervalue the views of young people. Just look at any of the examples of bow-tied child prodigies who can quote Hayek that are celebrated at conservative conferences or the many implausible “my precocious four-year-old just made this totally profound statement about economic inequality” social media posts that go viral, and you’ll see examples of amusement and novelty trumping actual argument. At the same time, there is now a great deal of noise being made about how these teenagers in Parkland, Fla., ought to pipe down, how they lack the life experience to have views worth considering.
Nonsense. Even absent the tragedy they have experienced, anyone — age 17 or age 70 — has a right to engage in advocacy about issues that matter to them. And for the students who have experienced horror, the weight of their personal tragedy makes them more than worthy of being heard.
Where there are instances of adults and the media are exploiting children by pushing them into a spotlight they would not seek for themselves or are pressuring them to advance an agenda about which the student may know very little, it is the adults who are absolutely worthy of criticism.
But to those kids who enter into to the debate of their own volition, who do their homework, dig into the issues, and come armed with arguments they passionately believe in: I wish you all the best, no matter what conclusion you come to about what we should do about guns in America. Being young does not disqualify you from being important. Your voice matters, and I hope you’ll continue to make it heard.
