Can a Million Moms Make a Difference?
“I’d just gotten my hair cut. I was driving down Devonshire and had to pull over three times for firetrucks. And I thought, ‘That must be one helluva fire.’ And I got home and the phone was ringing, and my ex-brother-in-law was saying, ‘Did you hear about the shooting?’ And I said, ‘Where?’ ”
This is the start of Gail Powers’ story, a mother’s story, a citizen’s story. Picture her as she tells it: edgy, thin, 42, a smoker, big glasses, cropped brown hair. A Northridge mom with a teenage daughter from her first marriage and a 5-year-old son from her second. A veteran parent with that knack for stopping in mid-sentence to dispense ice cream before picking up precisely where she left off. Her little boy was 4 at the time, just three months ago, if you can imagine. Though some things are unimaginable.
“My ex-brother-in-law said, ‘The Jewish Community Center,’ and ‘Isn’t that where you have Nathan?’ And--you can’t--I’ve never experienced that kind of terror and powerlessness in my life. The adrenaline was the only thing that kept me standing.” Her voice starts to tremble, and she tells Nathan, “Go play, honey.” And then: “I called my husband and got in the car and--the things you do. I kept stopping for the red lights before I ran them. All I could think was, ‘Oh please, oh God, oh God, don’t let anybody be dead.’ ”
The rest comes in flashes. Driving. Parking. Running. The sound of her own breath, her own heart. The sounds of the crowd and the helicopters. The hysterical parents on cell phones. The police officer saying, “Ma’am, you’re just going to have to wait behind the line with everyone else.” The sudden realization that her daughter still needed to be picked up from camp, and who was going to do it? The kind stranger who said, “Would you like to come into my house and use the phone?” And then, like a miracle, the image on the woman’s TV of that now-unforgettable daisy chain of children being led to safety, and in the second batch, Nathan’s stunned little face and curly hair.
Later, he would tell her that they had all been sitting on the rug with the teacher, reading that dinosaur book where the dinosaur has the googly eyes, when the man started shooting and they saw the smoke coming out of the cubbies and the teacher said, “Run, run, run!” and took them to the baby classroom. “My mom thought I was the guy who got shot,” Nathan says now, his brown eyes enormous, “but good thing I wasn’t!”
Nathan’s mom says: “I’ll be right back. I need a smoke.”
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That was the start--the rampage that ended in the arrest of white supremacist Buford Furrow in the wounding of five people at the Granada Hills JCC and the shooting death of a nearby postal worker afterward. The next part was more protracted, she says: “It took me a long time to get mad.”
When it finally hit home, she stopped sleeping and lost 12 pounds. She fought with her husband, a machinist. “I thought for a while that he wasn’t upset, because I didn’t see him talking about it, although he was--just not to me.” She had no work to console her; a former executive assistant, she’d been disabled by repetitive stress injury. She went to parents’ meetings at the JCC, but everyone was as shellshocked as she was. “It was like, ‘We’ve got to do something, but what can we do?’ ”
And she was not a veteran doer. “The only advocacy I’d ever done was to say, ‘I demand to speak to your supervisor’ to the HMO people,” she says. “I didn’t read the paper. I had no idea how many congressmen we had, and the only reason I could name the senators was because they were Jewish women like me.” Then her friend Karyn went to Washington, D.C., and came back with a flier for a project launched by an East Coast publicist and mother--who’d also seen that daisy chain on TV.
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“Tell Congress to GET SERIOUS about Common Sense Gun Legislation,” it said. “Mother’s Day 2000. The Million Mom March.” She signed onto the Web site (www.millionmommarch.com), and within days was posting fliers and rattling off the toll-free number--(888) 989-MOMS. Thus did Gail Powers move from mom to advocate.
Now, as California coordinator for the demonstration, which so far has signed up more than 3,000 marchers in 40 states, she spends her spare hours lobbying politicians and begging air time. Thanks to the shooting, she is studying to become a private security consultant for schools and day-care facilities.
She feels like a changed woman. “I went to a fund-raiser! What do I know from a fund-raiser? And here I am interrupting Rob Reiner and going, ‘What do you know about common sense gun legislation?’ I guess that’s what happens when you find your passion. And my kids are my heart.”
Call the Million Mom phone number or check out their Web site. It’s a start.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.