By Mickey Friedman
April 26, 2018
I’ve been privileged to have been amongst those who believed. Who when they sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” were marching and sitting for their lives. Who met teargas and billy clubs and horses with determined song.
If you’ve experienced those moments, you will know what many adults don’t. You will feel in your bones that these young people who marched for their lives around the country, those who marched around the world in solidarity, well they ain’t gonna let nobody turn them around.
I had my weekly Saturday demonstration to support those who we’ve sent to fight the unending war, then sat transfixed before MSNBC and watched with admiration as one young woman and man after another spoke with such extraordinary poise and undeniable passion about what had happened to them, their friends, family and community at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and how they have been so profoundly changed.
Maybe it’s taken fifty-five years to see in flesh and blood Martin Luther King’s dream: black and white and brown, non-violent, determined, emboldened with “the fierce urgency of NOW,” to reject the business as usual of gun violence, of death at the hands of the unhealthy, those who so easily arm themselves then kill so many so easily.
These young people didn’t talk about what to do about racism, or the oh so common double standard about gun violence: our focus on white victims and our amnesia about those of color whose lives are every day shattered by bullets. They just stood before us black and white and brown, gay and straight, rich and poor, testifying together about the tragedies that bound them together. They are the world Martin imagined for us as we stood in the sun that day in 1963 in Washington DC so long ago.
The stupid bullies amongst us, the Laura Ingrahams, those emboldened by the blood-stained dollars of the arms-makers have and will continue to try to minimize these young people, to question their motivation. But they can’t appreciate the inspiration that comes from knowing deep in your heart, deep in your bones that enough is enough. It may seem like a slogan to some, but it is a truth to those who gave us the March For Our Lives.
If you couldn’t see it in the eyes of those young people who stood before you couldn’t hear it in their voices well then I sorry for you. For until you do you will find yourself on the wrong side of history.
A few weeks ago, I listened to a young woman from Parkland. I was busy writing but had the television on. I’m sorry I didn’t catch her name and I might not have it completely right but she said something like “I don’t want to be hunted.”
It was one of those moments for me. Some of my friends have guns. I remember going to shoot with them. Maybe it was some small vestige of the residual paranoia that I’ve accumulated as a result of all those demonstrations, the tear gas, the billy clubs, the horses, the Alabama National Guard with their confederate flags as we marched on the capitol in Montgomery, but before I knew it I was seeing myself not as the shooter but on the receiving end of that 357 Magnum. I could imagine the force of that bullet ripping through me. Perhaps a just say no flashback moment.
Not reality, thank God. But for Parkland, Chicago, Pulse, for Sandy Hook, for East L.A., for all those who found themselves speaking to almost a million in D.C., well those bullets were real. They survived, they watched others die.
No insensitive political bully, no Santorum, no NRA flak has the moral authority or personal experience to dispute the truth of their lives.
And what is wonderful is that they have already figured out how easily the adults around them talk and talk and talk about all the reasons why there aren’t easy answers. Pontificating how in their youth and naïveté these young people are simplifying the complex. They may have been hunted and may have been shot but they don’t understand the Second Amendment. Don’t appreciate how many law-abiding gun owners there are. And that these good men and women really like their semi-automatic assault rifles.
But these young people are smart. They read and think and know. And as Emma Gonzalez declared: “We call B.S.” Saying out loud, without shame or self-consciousness what is so very obvious to her classmates, her generation. These excuses are bullshit. Grown men can talk themselves into twisted circles, as Antonin Scalia did, to re-write the Second Amendment to empower every Dick and Harry to arm himself to the teeth but it’s B.S. No one needs an AR-15 except to hunt and kill others.
And these young people will march and sit in and vote for their lives.
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“Ain’t Gonna” was published first in the April 12, 2018 edition of The Berkshire Record.