The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. I’d always preached to him the importance of seeing things for yourself before making a decision, of talking to people individually to understand what motivated them. In fact, they were perfectly (too perfectly?) reverse-engineered to match my own values. His case was well thought out, his explanations admirable. The rally was just a half-hour Metro ride from our home in Washington’s outer suburbs-so he could make the trip alone, he assured me, flashing the transit app on his phone. As he would tell me later: “I wanted to be part of something big.”
His favorite school subject was history, he reminded me, and he hungered to witness a genuinely significant event firsthand. I can still see him standing in front of me, the longing apparent in his big brown eyes. He’d anticipated my automatic veto and readied reasons in favor of attending-not as a participant, he stressed, but as an observer. Sam knew exactly how I would react to his request. Police there were unable to protect citizens I couldn’t reasonably expect this gathering in DC to be any different.
I couldn’t shake off the shock of her violent murder, or of watching men with tiki torches shout racist slogans across the University of Virginia grounds. At Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally only a month earlier, a neo-Nazi had killed counterprotester Heather Heyer. Not only was this not how I wanted to spend a Saturday-like almost everyone I knew, I’d been devastated by the 2016 election results-but I had serious concerns about safety. The pro-Trump event was billed as a demonstration to preserve “traditional American culture,” and white supremacists were expected to show up in force. When my son Sam,* who was then 14, asked me to take him to the Mother of All Rallies on the Mall in September 2017, I said no.
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