“She hid under her desk. She didn’t know what was going on,” Heidi said of her twelve-year-old daughter Melinda, who stood at the March for Our Lives in New York City with Deanna, her nine-year-old sister, holding a sign that read, Enough is enough. Her phone had been in her book bag, so for twenty minutes she couldn’t contact anyone. While they waited as the school was on lockdown, a pregnant teacher rubbed her belly. It turned out to be a false alarm, but Melinda and her classmates were shaken. “This has become such a common occurrence,” Heidi told us, looking at her daughters. “It has to stop.”
Droves of people gathered at 72nd Street and Central Park West to walk south. Young people dressed in bright puffer jackets and pom pom hats were accompanied by older chaperones, some wearing buttons and stickers, and holding signs that conveyed simple messages of urgency: Protect kids, not guns, Books not bullets, and Arms are for hugging, not for killing (in the uneven crayon scrawl of a seven-year-old named Henry). Many of the people we spoke to said they were driven to protest because they were tired of violence and grieving, and because they felt helpless. The crowd cheered affirmatively when asked if they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” and the lineup of speakers itself enacted the particular sort of emotional exhaustion that gun violence inflicts: a girl who had stayed calm while the Parkland shooter knocked on her classroom’s door; a woman who had lost two children; a college student who had lost her father; a boy who had been at the country music festival in Las Vegas, where his friend was shot in the back; a librarian at Sandy Hook who’d hidden a classroom of kindergarteners in a locked room; a woman whose grandchild was murdered at Stoneman Douglas; a girl who had lost her father on September 11. These stories take their toll. One sign warned: It will happen again… and again… and again… and again.
And yet these refrains of weariness were accompanied at every stage by energetic expressions of optimism, even joy, on the part of young people who were participating, organizing, and performing at the march. A group of Broadway Kids performed a ballad written by two Parkland students called “Shine,” with lyrics that could have been inspired by any number of high-school hardships—bullying, romantic rejection, failure: “You’re not gonna knock us down / We’ll get back up again / You may have hurt us but I promise we are stronger… You may have brought the dark / But together we will shine a light.” The song’s rallying cry highlights how easy it is to be on the right side of this issue. There’s one side that has “brought the dark,” and one that will “shine a light”—who are you with? In the words of Jackie, twelve: “I don’t like the fact that I could go to school and possibly get hurt.”
Simple to pick the right side, but not so simple to solve the problem. In their speeches on Saturday morning, the young organizers of the New York City march called for an intersectional approach to gun control: “Today we want to tell stories not just about what happens in our schools, but in those communities and neighborhoods who have faced these challenges for years. We recognize you. And we expect our media to recognize you as well.” The speakers who followed—diverse in age, race, region, and experience—demonstrated the point to a tearful audience. “You should care just as much about shootings in the Bronx and the south side of Chicago as you do about shootings everywhere else,” said Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter Greater New York. Hilda, a woman in her seventies attending the march with the Riverside Church, told us that anyone who perpetrates a mass shooting should be called a terrorist, no matter the color of his skin—whereas the media often uses words like “troubled” or “loner” to describe white male shooters, but “terrorist” and “extremist” to describe non-white shooters.
“We talk about mental health without really understanding what that means, how we address it, and how we create smart gun policy around it,” said a speaker who was in Las Vegas last fall when Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert crowd, killing fifty-eight people and injuring 851 (422 of whom had gunshot wounds). The March for Our Lives is explicit in its support of gun control legislation like Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act—which raises the age to purchase a firearm from eighteen to twenty-one; requires a three-day waiting period for most gun purchases; and bans “bump stocks,” which allow semiautomatic rifles to fire like machine-guns. Mary Ann Jacob, the librarian at Sandy Hook, said she’d thought the deaths of twenty elementary school children would have been enough to motivate politicians to address our “uniquely American problem.”
“I originally come from a rural area so I grew up with guns,” said Narcissa, who came to the march with her husband and two middle-school-aged children. “But you shot coyotes with them or went hunting with them—they weren’t identities,” she told us. “They’ve become an identity, not a tool.” While some have charged the left, after the 2016 election, with blindly championing identity politics, it’s the right that is most tied to the gun lobby and has encouraged gun-owners to think and organize politically as an identity group.
Many young people—too young to vote—were marching at a demonstration for the first time in their lives, but for three older women sitting on the sidelines—Dale, Natalie, and Margo—this was one of countless such events they had attended throughout their lifetimes, including protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars and for the Equal Rights Amendment. For Dale, the reason gun control was getting more attention than some of the other political issues she had supported in the past was that this was a matter of “life and death.” Then she reconsidered: “Well, with abortion, too, it was an issue because people had to get their abortions illegally… the same thing with Vietnam, no one wanted to die.”
The truth is, all political issues that mobilize us tend to be, at base, a matter of “life and death,” but they’re not always so easily expressed as such. One poster read, A child’s life is worth more than a gun, and then below, Do I even need to say that? Apparently, we do. Under an administration that so often makes us speechless with disbelief, we need the voices of people like Neil, aged fifteen, and a first-time marcher: “Everything’s totally unacceptable and it’s outrageous and it’s not okay.”
—Liza Batkin and Lucy McKeon
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen