Paying attention to the impact of trauma on young people from the Parkland school (www.longreads.com)

Note: I spotted this article published as part of Longreads, an excellent site that publishes long form journalism, and thought I'd share it with this community.  The young people who experienced the Parkland shooting are turning their grief and terror into powerful activism, and for that we're all grateful. That said, they need and deserve - as all survivors do - help with their post traumatic stress, now and for years to come.  'm also concerned about how the need to tell and retell their stories may be triggering the trauma over and over, causing them harm.

While I am grateful for their courage in finding their voices and sharing their stories, I think that we should be mindful of what we're asking of them and what they deserve in terms of support and services - and also that we should be mindful that the choice not to tell and retell one's story is equally valid.  Here's the link to story and an excerpt from Are The Teens All Right? by Danielle Tcholakian

Over the past several weeks, many of us have been familiar with the voices and faces of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered on February 14. The students appeared to quickly shunt away their grief, giving adults across the U.S. a schooling on effective activism, taking to Twitter and effectively employing media outlets to push for policy change so that other teenagers won’t have to experience the terror they did.

In turn, many of the adults that other adults have elected to positions of power — adults we apparently decided were such worthy and good decision-makers that we would pay their salary out of our own pockets — have shown us what very small people they are, and how terribly unqualified they are to be people in the public eye, let alone leaders. Florida state representative Elizabeth Porter delivered a truly inane speech on the statehouse floor in which she conflated the Parkland teens with children asking for a law to be passed banning homework.

“Are there any children on this floor?” she asks. “Are there any making laws?”