When the people speak up, the powerful should look out
Awe-inspiring forces of change have risen from public pain
The power of the voice, the power of so many voices.
If I were to focus on a lesson from the past few months of public pain on so many levels, I would say it’s the aweinspiring power that people harness when they finally feel free to speak up. When they say publicly to those who have victimized them — including politicians — enough is enough. We demand change.
I usually don’t like the Oprah-esque sentiment of “speaking your truth.” As a journalist, I believe in THE truth.
Yet we’ve watched the explosive growth of the #MeToo movement, through searing and intensely personal truths, reveal just how prevalent sexual harassment and assault are in our society; and learned how gender equality in the workplace must address the power imbalance that allowed this abuse for so many years.
We’ve watched powerful men in many fields fall like dominoes as their predatory practices were assiduously documented and called out.
Give or take a few missteps — Patrick Brown, you may have rightfully gained another chance to prove yourself, but your private-life judgments are still in question — more will follow.
Things will never be the same. Or as the infamous former Trump associate Steve Bannon told author Michael Lewis, “It’s not just sexual harassment, it’s an antipatriarchy movement. Time’s up on 10,000 years of recorded history.” On that we can only hope, Steve.
In the last two months, we heard scores of young women, gifted gymnasts, some in the most powerful language I’ve ever heard, confront former Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar on live television at his sentencing hearing about the vile sexual assaults he perpetrated on them in the guise of treatments. Nassar is now in jail for the rest of his life.
This week, in the aftermath of last week’s horrific but not atypical mass shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people, traumatized and impassioned students parents and teachers personally affected by that tragedy are using their raw, griefstricken voices to confront politicians from the state level right up to the Oval Office to demand they do something about the number of guns — especially assault weapons — freely available in their country.
It was humbling and thrilling to see student Cameron Kasky confront Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida in a riveting CNN town hall this week and say to the politician who has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NRA and remains staunchly pro-gun: “Senator Rubio, can you tell me now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?”
He didn’t commit to that, of course he didn’t, but Rubio, pale and grim and on the wrong side of history in that exchange and many others (and yet still the only GOP politician to show up for the dramatic town hall) agreed to modify his position on several key gun-control issues. He will have to be hounded to ensure that he does.
Even U.S. President Donald Trump, with his Coles’ Notes of empathic listening held tight in his tiny hands, seemed affected by his own “listening” session with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, although he still inanely thinks arming teachers is a good idea.
It doesn’t matter what they call their movement — some are using #NeverAgain — but the push for what former president Barack Obama calls “long overdue, common-sense gun safety laws that most Americans want” is now in the ascendancy.
A powerful tweet in support of those voices came from Michelle Obama: “I’m in total awe of the extraordinary students in Florida. Like every movement for progress in our history, gun reform will take unyielding courage and endurance. But (we) believe in you, we’re proud of you, and we’re behind you every step of the way.”
The students and parents speaking up now, such brave determined people who can in the face of unspeakable grief, even get up, get dressed and attend funerals, let alone appear on live television, microphones in hand, are not begging for change. They are demanding it. Stoneman Douglas senior Emma Gonzalez engaged the world last weekend at a rally, by proclaiming “we call BS” on politicians who deny that gun laws would save lives.
She was echoed by Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, quintessentially law and order, who sat beside an uncomfortable NRA spokesperson at the CNN forum saying, “Emma and I, we’re calling BS on that” as he demanded the curtailment of automatic weapons.
Gonzalez also declared: “We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks.”
Not as victims of a shooting. But because they will fight to change what’s really evil and wrong in American soci- ety — a perverted fidelity to a long outmoded Second Amendment that today lets the troubled and the monstrous terrorize communities with weapons of war.
Movements take time. They falter and have to be rebuilt. From the American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. to Black Lives Matter, from Anita Hill calling out her harasser, then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in 1991 to today’s #MeToo tidal wave, from decades of mostly futile demands for gun control squashed by the obscene money and power of the NRA to another eloquent Stoneman Douglas student Ryan Deitsch plaintively asking politicians at that forum: “Why do we have to be the ones to do this?” That is heartbreaking.
Yet remember anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Onward. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.