A tiny glimmer of hope emerges from tragedy
Can we even dare to imagine that a place named in honour of a crusader is where America’s crusade to save itself from gun violence will make a significant turning point, or at least become unstuck?
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas — the namesake of the Florida high school-turnedcrime-scene in the seconddeadliest mass shooting at a U.S. public school — was a journalist, a suffragette, a civil rights and anti-poverty activist and an environmentalist. A reporter for the St. Petersburg Times once described her as having “... a tongue like a switchblade and the moral authority to embarrass bureaucrats and politicians and make things happen.”
Stoneman Douglas passed away in 1998 but her formidable spirit is alive and well in Emma Gonzalez and other student survivors of this most recent school shooting. Recently, with a crowd of protesters chanting “Shame on you!” tagging U.S. lawmakers for their meaningless tweets of “thoughts and prayers,” Gonzalez announced a national march on Washington to demand political action on gun control.
There are two planned protests. The first is a 17-minute walkout at 10 a.m. on March 14 sponsored by the Youth EMPOWER branch of the Women’s March Movement. Organizers are asking students, teachers, school administrators, parents and allies to “demand Congress pass legislation to keep us safe from gun violence at our schools, on our streets and in our homes and places of worship.” The movement will no doubt capitalize on a pre-existing organizational structure to mobilize people through social media.
Backlash is already brewing among the usual suspects. In spite of acknowledging that “A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally” a Texas school district superintendent briefly threatened to suspend students who participate in the walkout. Perhaps awareness and personal growth are mutually exclusive in the Lone Star State.
At the same time, March for Our Lives is co-ordinating large-scale marches in Washington and other American cities on March 24. It wants lawmakers to depoliticize school safety, saying, “There cannot be two sides to doing everything in our power to ensure the lives and futures of children who are at risk of dying when they should be learning, playing, and growing.”
It’s fair to say that until now, much of the world had all but given up hope that a sufficient number of Americans might actually get mad as hell and not want to take it anymore, never mind hold their leaders’ feet to the fire to force even the smallest legislative action on the seemingly intractable issue of gun control.
Even in America, hopelessness has become the default reaction to mass shootings. The front page of a recent edition of The Boston Globe revealed the extent to which mainstream media in the U.S. have succumbed to the acquired numbness of so much pain followed by so little action. The venerable publication covered the “next” mass shooting, the one that hasn’t happened yet but that is undoubtedly assured.
Today, though, even the most hardened observers of this familiar American drama have to lift up their heads and wonder whether an emergent student protest movement might help a beleaguered nation write a new ending.
My own hard-boiled heart came to life just a little bit last week, in anticipation of watching young people take to the streets. It’s not that I feel something as extravagant as hope, exactly, but I’ve had to question the psychological soundness of futilitarianism as a coping skill.
When it happened, and in mere seconds, I turned away from news coverage of the Parkland shooting. Afterward, I had to ask myself: If all that these mass shootings in America (and some here at home) have done is to teach me, however gradually, to feel absolutely nothing in the wake of mass murder, isn’t my soul also a little bit lost?
Those of us who have travelled the curious emotional spectrum from disgust, to outrage to cynicism to jadedness to indifference to oblivion — where tragedies have become business as usual — are all part of the collateral damage of mass shooters and the wilfully obstructionist lawmakers and lobbyists upon whom these crazed loners rely to access weapons.
The Stoneman Douglas students have snapped me out of the fog of futility. For the moment I will focus on the young survivor who told CNN she felt “lost.” To her credit she is still standing. She doesn’t know what else to do but walk alongside her peers.
She may not feel overly optimistic as to what end, or for what greater good she walks, but by the simple act of walking she, like Marjorie, will be a force to be reckoned with.
Freelance writer Michelle Hauser lives in Napanee with her husband Mark and their son Joseph. She can be reached at mhauser@hotmail.ca