Moral leadership may be found in youthful truth
Another horrible week in America ended with a sliver of light seen through the tears of rage and grief of a young woman whose Florida high school was the latest US mass murder crime scene.
“If all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see,” Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School said during a remarkable 12-minute oration at a gun-control rally in Fort Lauderdale.
No clearer indictment of the failure of America’s leaders to confront the national lunacy over guns has been heard than that of this high school senior, speaking on behalf of her 17 dead schoolmates and teachers, 14 more who were shot and survived, and those who, like her, are trying to recover from the psychological wounds. One-by-one she listed the too familiar gun-rights talking points, and each one seemed to take on self-evident absurdity as she punctuated it with, “we call BS,” while the crowd picked up the chant. Maybe a nation that can no longer look to its highest elected office for moral or ethical leadership can find it in the untarnished truth of the young millennials, who seem to understand that a constitutional amendment written by men in powdered wigs need not be sacrosanct in the 21st Century.
“(To) politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA (National Rifle Association) telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Gonzalez cried. “They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS . . . They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
The hope comes most when she calls out a final lie. “That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.”
But even as she was speaking, the self-obsessed American president was on Twitter issuing yet more proof that he is irredeemably unfit for the office.
So sad, President Trump posted, that the FBI missed the clues that could have prevented the Stoneman Douglas massacre because it (the FBI) is focused instead on investigating Russian-Trump election connections. “No collusion,” he tweeted, as he does almost every day. So sad indeed. Just miles from where he sat in his elite Florida golf retreat, a community was torn to shreds, and the president of the United States found in their tragedy a thread to utter in his own defense.
Atlantic Canadians, like citizens elsewhere in the world, need to pay attention to the grotesque presidency. It may be the last act in America’s leadership of global democracy, and by its own dereliction the beginning of the end of democracy there, as it has been in so many other nations in the past decade.
Or, Trump may be the final straw that arouses in good people who hold American citizenship the courage to stand with Emma Gonzalez and say “enough.” Rampant gun violence is a symptom of deeper rot, but it is a symptom that must be treated on the way to digging out the deeper rot. Great social and cultural fissures lie hidden just beneath the surface of societies, almost never detected until a spark ignites sudden and revolutionary change. And then, in retrospect it all seems so inevitable.
Trump tapped into rich veins of cultural fear that many had thought were healed in American society. They’re not. They coalesce in that deeper rot.
The confessed Stoneman Douglas shooter identified with Trump, lurked in alt-right chat rooms and wore a “Make America Great Again” cap. He is a damaged and broken young man who would be vilified as a terrorist if his search for belonging had taken him to extremism that perverts Islam rather than to the racism he embraced.
Emma Gonzalez survived his attack, thus enduring the worst America has to offer, and just three days later stood before her nation and called it out on its own BS. America will decide which of these two young Americans is their future.