What It’s Like Being A Survivor Of the Parkland Massacre When Your Drunk QAnon Father Calls It A Hoax

Growing up is not easy and some families are more dysfunctional than others. That is a sad but very true fact of life. And growing up nowadays in the dual narrative of the two Americas can make the normal rites de passage of adolescence difficult and the abnormal ones — such as surviving a school shooting — unbearable. Enter one “Bill” (not his real name) who is a survivor of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida. Nine of his classmates got killed that day. Bill initially had survivor’s guilt, but that was before his father became a fan of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Dad bought into Greene’s videotaped harassment of Parkland student David Hogg on the streets of Washington, D.C. and from there it was a jump to QAnon, and to the day when he accused his son and the rest of the people involved in the Parkland shooting of being “liars” and “actors.” VICE News:

Bill first posted his story on QAnon Casualties, a Reddit thread dedicated to helping family members and friends of QAnon believers.

VICE News spoke to the poster and confirmed the author’s claims about being a survivor of the school shooting. Bill is not the student’s real name as they only spoke to VICE News on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about attacks from members of QAnon forums if his identity was revealed.

As is true for many who fell down the QAnon rabbit hole in recent years, Bill’s dad’s descent coincided with the pandemic.

“It started a couple months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” Bill said. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people which led him to QAnon.”

But until January, that was as far as it went. Then Bill’s father saw a video of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Parkland survivor David Hogg in 2018, while he was visiting Washington to advocate for stricter gun control. Greene has repeatedly voiced support for QAnon and claimed the Parkland shooting was a hoax.

Ever since then, Bill’s father has become convinced the shooting his son survived was a so-called “false flag” event and that the shooter was “​​a radical commie actor.”

“From there it snowballed into what he is today, believing that if the government is able to overthrow an election, then everything else is probably a lie too,” Bill added.

Bill is 18, and now that he’s graduated high school he’s looking to get out of the toxic situation he finds himself in.

“I do have options that can have me out before August, which as of now I’m planning to do,” Bill said. “I’ve been delaying it because I’ve felt stuck trying to ‘fix’ my dad.”

But Bill said that after he posted his story on Reddit, members of the QAnon Casualties community have been able to help him “push through that obligation I felt and leave before I completely lose my mind, because I’m already halfway there.”

I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional household myself. Denial of reality was something I lived with but it basically was denial of the family’s reality, as opposed to denial of news stories in the real world. I was 14 when both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and I don’t know what I would have done if I had had to pretend to a crazy father that these events really hadn’t taken place, or if they had taken place, but the shootings were done by jihad rebels from Jupiter or some such. My heart goes out totally to this young man. It’s incredibly difficult to deal with a parent who can’t deal with reality and I know whereof I speak.

Bill also says he’s been unable to talk to any of his fellow survivors about what he has been going through with this father.

“I never talked about it with them,” Bill told VICE News. “As far as I know he’s only held that belief—at least so strongly—since January. Our last semester was difficult enough with Feb. 14 marking 3 years since the shooting, along with emotions leading up to us being the last class of survivors to graduate.”

“It wasn’t—and still isn’t—easy to bottle up, but telling them my dad thinks the absolute hell we went through, where nine of the victims were in our class, is a hoax is not a pain I want to put on them. It’s difficult enough knowing that belief even exists at all.”

At this point, Bill has little hope in ever seeing his father return to the person he was before he became obsessed with QAnon conspiracy theories, and even if he did, too much has happened to ever repair their relationship.

“He’ll never stop on his own, because there are always new theories and goalposts being moved,” Bill said. “I don’t know how to help someone that far gone. My guess is restricted access to the internet and lots of therapy. But even if there was hope he’d eventually snap out of it, it wouldn’t change my mind on never wanting to see him again. So it doesn’t really matter anymore.”

These wounds do not heal. In my case, the elephant in the room was my mentally ill brother, who was ten years older than me. His problems started when he was very young. He was messed up as long as I could remember and my parents simply could not deal with it. My mother left my father when I was nine, because she couldn’t cope with either her marriage or her crazy son, and I became what was known in those days as a “latch key kid” meaning that you came home to an empty house and let yourself in. I was happy when the house was empty. It was when my crazy brother was at home and hiding behind the locked door hallucinating enemies that I had problems.

Bottom line, I grew up estranged from my mother and became progressively more estranged from my father as time went by. My brother died in a mental institution when I was 23 and I buried my father when I was 26. I’m not quite clear on when my mother died, we were not close, obviously. I see the same pattern developing with the young man in this story and this is far from the only story out there of kids coping with Fox News-viewing parents and the wild things they believe. Young people are forced sometimes to withdraw from crazed parents for their own survival. It frequently is as simple as that.

The big question is why? The term generation gap was coined in the sixties, due to the fact that the 78 million people born between 1946 and 1964 didn’t see things the way their forebears did — and with ample reason. WWII culminated in the explosion of atomic bombs, probably the single most watershed moment in human history. The stakes of war became different then, no question.

The Vietnam war was not the same kind of honorable war that had always been fought by Americans and the assassination of key figures like JFK, RFK and Dr. King greatly intensified and toxified the cultural and political landscape.

The sixties were a time of an immense cultural shift and for good reason. Likewise, the end of the second decade of the 21st century is also a time of seismic cultural realignment, but for reasons which are not nearly so good.

The underbelly of the society has been laid bare and violent forces have been unleashed. Who these people are, what they hope to achieve, is the subject of much debate and even more turmoil. But underlying it all is one undeniable fact: for the first time in human history, people don’t agree on what the basic facts of life are. We have always seen people with differing viewpoints and opinion. Deciding that the same fact can be construed to mean two or more different things is human nature. But never before have we had a situation where one group is flat out saying that an event did not occur on such and such day, that it was made up by another group, for the purpose of political or financial gain. That’s why things in this brave new world are so frightening.

You can only live in unreality so long. If you have an ache or pain and you decide to ignore it, it’s only a question of time before the doctor gives you the sad news that the tumor must in fact be excised or take your life. Or, there are times when the tumor has been ignored for too long and the doctor simply informs you that now it will take your life and nothing can be done. There are people in ERs across the country getting this exact same pronouncement due to COVID-19. They waited too long. For reasons which defy explanation, so many people are choosing to believe a preposterous conspiracy theory, or more than one, rather than deal with life on life’s terms. This cannot end well. This is who we are as a people in 2021.

Donald Trump loves to foment dissension in the culture war. The ensuing chaos gives him a chance to be in the limelight and grift, his two great passions in life. So on those facts, don’t look for him to stop lying any time soon. It’s in his benefit to continue. But the price tag connected with his lies and other right-wing dissembling is staggering. The price in human life and in the quality of human life, such as the first person testimony of the young survivor in this story, tells a sad and shocking story.

(A tip of the hat to our fellow Zoomer Vic Sexton who sent me the link to this story.)

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