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rm% democracy in crisis
Confronting the Death Cult
THREE LESSONS LEARNED AT THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES
By Brandon Soderberg democracyincrisiscolumn@gmail.com
Anything this big can’t be that good, you’d
like to think.
Last year’s Women’s March was right
fully criticized for blinding whiteness and
a recalcitrant approach to intersectional-
ity, but after a million or so people again
appeared out in protest for last weekend’s
March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, it’s
apparent that 2017 march set the Trump-
era precedent for large protest, and the
importance of that is incalculable.
Parkland’s student activists, a stunning
example of the “don’t mourn, organize”
ethos, have their shit together when it
comes to what to say about guns in this
country, while Democrats five times their
age leading the so-called Resistance just
don’t and never will. The march called
attention to school shootings and the
gun lobby, and then it kept on pivoting to
include any and all victims of gun violence
and acknowledging bias, privilege and
racial disparity along the way. It took the
Women’s March’s homogeneity and tilted it
towards intersectionality.
At its core, it was an anti-National Rifle
Association parade (wisely, because protest
should offer hope always, it was cast as The
March for Our Lives), and that’s a good
thing, because the NRA is a death cult and
has nothing useful or sincere to say about
gun rights. If an undercover video produced
by Channel 4 exposed NRA bigwigs meeting
in the molten core of the planet, sacrificing
animals and fellating AR-15s, would you
really be surprised?
One of the million or so marchers there
on Saturday was Nora Ludden. She knows
firsthand how long the gun access and
gun control debate has circled the drain.
She’s a survivor of the 1992 Simon’s Rock
shooting, in which 18-year-old Wayne Lo,
a student at Simon’s Rock College of Bard
in Massachusetts, murdered two people on
campus and wounded four after purchasing
a semi-automatic rifle at a sporting goods
store.
“This terrible thing has been going on
for a very long time. I was a teenager myself
when there was a shooting at my school,”
Ludden said. “The shooter was able to get
a gun very easily with no waiting period or
background check or anything.”
Ludden is one of many Simon’s Rock
alumni who signed a petition demanding
“more access to mental health services
and less access to weapons” following the
Newtown, CT shooting, which happened
exactly 20 years after the Simon’s Rock
shooting.
“Now, you see this continue for decades,”
Ludden said. “To see my kids still dealing
with the same thing I did is just really
heartbreaking.”
You’ve surely seen the march’s speeches
by now, especially from Parkland’s David
Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, but don’t forget
about Edna Chavez. The 17-year-old South
Central Los Angeles activist paid tribute
to her brother Ricardo, who was shot and
killed, and made clear how school shootings
and the kinds of gun violence she and thou
sands of others have endured in cities such
as Baltimore or Chicago intertwine.
“You hear a ‘pop’ thinking they were
fireworks. They weren’t. You see melanin on
your brother’s skin
turned grey. Ricardo
was his name, can
y’all say it with me?”
Chavez asked.
Later, Chavez
challenged “solu
tions” such as more police in schools or
more police in general. “Zero tolerance pol
icies do not work,” Chavez said. “They make
us feel like criminals.”
The Guardian recently published “Our
Manifesto to Fix America’s Gun Laws,” writ
ten by the staff of the Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School newspaper, and
among the demands was one to “Increase
funding for school security,” and here was
Chavez, calling B.S. on it.
The lesson: Always listen to people
younger than you are, even when you think
they’re wrong—especially when you think
they’re wrong. As very young people act
very adult and organize, a whole bunch of
adults in power act like children, especially
in the White House and all around it.
Trump’s revolving-door administration
welcomes warmongering mustache man
John Bolton. What was Bolton doing when
he was the age of most of the Parkland
students, you may wonder? He ran the
Students for Barry Goldwater campaign at
the very bougie private school he attended
outside of Baltimore.
Before South Side Chicago rapper Vic
Mensa performed at the March for Our
Lives, he mentioned Sacramento’s Stephon
Clark, shot 20 times by police in his own
backyard on Mar. 18, holding a cell phone
that cops claim they thought was a gun
(they also muted their body cameras
during the deadly
encounter), and
Decynthia Clements
from Elgin, not far
from Chicago, who
was shot and killed
after an extended
chase with the police during which she also
lunged at cops with a steak knife and set
the inside of her car on fire. An “imper
fect” victim of police violence, but a victim
nonetheless.
Police have killed almost 300 people this
year. Clark, whose death does not seem
like it will go away quietly, was shot and
killed on Mar. 18. There have been nearly
30 police shootings since then. The lesson:
Cops are guns—instrumentalized, surveil-
ling means of destruction. ©
Brandon Soderberg is the former editor of the
Baltimore City Paper, former news editor of the
Baltimore Beat, and the author of Daddy Lessons: I
Country Music Zine for the Trumpocalypse.
Always listen to people
younger than you are, even
when you think they’re wrong.
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MARCH 28, 2018 | FLAGPOLE.COM
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