When kids become pawns in political arguments
I’m not a big fan of agitprop. Those showy protests where people stand around with tape across their mouth to show that they’ve been “silenced,” or those deliberately melodramatic episodes where people lie down across major intersections to show they’ve been figuratively killed (and in the process, murder our evening commutes home), or those parades where pink crochet hats represent liberated genitalia bouncing around on liberated female heads, are really nothing more than annoying attempts to scream, “Look at me!”
It’s virtue signaling of the highest order, and as annoying as the vegan who looks at you with a pained look on her humanitarian face while you dig into that juicy burger. Don’t preach to me about how your values are better than mine, thank you very much. On the other hand, if you must have your little display of righteous indignation, and of course you must, don’t be surprised if you hear me clapping with one hand.
But even worse than the displays of the uber-evolved progressives (let’s call them UEPs) who continue to assault us weekly with their displeasure about the status quo is the attempt, by these UEPs, to enlist schoolchildren in their varied crusades. We saw the young women marching next to mama and grand mama and auntie and favorite teacher at the Pink Hat March this year and last. How wonderful to see toddlers carrying signs that said “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” (I have pictures, in case you’re interested).
We saw children being deployed in the health care debates, including one little boy whose mother died and who was stationed next to President Obama as he signed the Affordable Care Act into law, prompting us to believe that if the mean conservatives hadn’t prevented his mother from having health insurance, she would have survived.
Children have been used in immigration protests, in Planned Parenthood crusades (and to be fair, in prolife marches,) and in political campaigns. One of the most effective uses of children in recent years was the brilliant commercial that showed them watching the TV as images of an admittedly profane and meanspirited candidate Donald Trump filled the screen. It was breathtaking, even more powerful than the old Daisy/nuclear bomb commercial during the Goldwater-Johnson campaign, and I truly thought that it would be the last nail in Trump’s coffin.
The fact that I was wrong and that he is now president doesn’t take anything away from the power of that visual message.
And now, as I mentioned last week, children are being mined for their emotional impact in the gun debate. After my piece entitled “Teens are dupes for anti-gun politics” (not my title, by the way) appeared in last Sunday’s ,Ireceived lot of negative blowback from people like Tom from East Norriton, who wrote: “The most appalling words you have ever written are ‘The young people who are standing in front of the cameras and condemning our gun-loving society are appropriating the tragedy of their classmates for political goals.”
Tom is fully entitled to his opinion, as are the others who wrote to say that I was a horrible person for even thinking that the anger and sorrow of the children was not genuine. The problem is, I never said I don’t think the children are not being “genuine.” Quite the contrary, I think they are as earnest and true and they could possibly be, and people like that idiot Daryl Metcalfe in Harrisburg are wrong to suggest that they are actors, “faking it.” They are deadly serious. My problem is with the people who are exploiting their genuine pain for political goals, and I don’t really mean partisan goals, but in some ways it is an anti-Republican crusade. Republicans are seen as lackeys for the National Rifle Association, and the two are generally conflated (let’s call it the GOPNRA, which is a three-headed monster carrying a gun in each mouth), but there is a larger agenda at issue, and it’s not entirely differentiated by party affiliation.
This week, students across the country and in our own backyard will be staging a walkout. Some schools will have their students leave the building for 17 minutes, to mark each of the 17 lives lost in the Parkland massacre. Others will have the students attend assemblies where there will be 17 minutes of silence, to symbolize the same thing. Others still will close down the school altogether.
Those who don’t want to participate are able to opt out, which means they will either stay in school (where apparently there will be no teachers teaching), or not wear the white T-shirt and orange ribbon in tribute to the fallen, or simply ignore the maelstrom around them. That is going to be very hard, because if the default position is “we will walk out of school in protest and show how we care about the lives of our friends,” not walking out with them is an implicit “we don’t care.”
And that’s wrong, and that’s one of the reasons I have a big problem with this protest. It puts the burden on kids who might not want to be used as pawns in a larger agenda to explain why they “don’t care.” Which is really a heavy load to place on anyone’s shoulders, let alone a middle or high schooler.
I also have a big problem using the symbolism of abandoning a school to prove how evolved and caring we are about students. The argument that, well, schools are unsafe and so it makes sense to walk out of them in symbolic protest falls flat. If these kids are walking out of school, what are they walking toward? Wouldn’t it be better to have those moments of silence at the desk, and then engage in debates in the classroom about gun safety, or have mock legislative sessions, or write letters to the congressman who have let the students down? I know that’s not as sexy and dramatic and eye-catching, and I know that won’t give the newscasters a shot at stratospheric ratings, but it would be more substantive and effective.
But the thing that angers me the most about this whole protest is not its form, or its substance, but its backstory. My good friend Craig Williams discussed this with me on my radio show last Sunday, and you can access the podcast here: http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/audio/ christine-flowers/gerrymandering-christine-f lowers/ During the podcast, Craig revealed something that I hadn’t known, and that is the role that the Women’s March organizers were playing in putting this protest together. A good source of information confirming this is a recent article at The Federalist entitled “Why Did It Take Two Weeks to Discover Parkland Students Astroturfing?” (http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/01/take-twoweeks-truth-emerge-parkland-students-astroturfing/)
I asked Craig, who is much better at distilling the fundamental problem with this protest than I am, to weigh in. Here is some of what he had to say:
“The Women’s March should not be used by progressive parents and school administrators acting through the children to thought-shame or valueshame or conservativeshame a vast group in our community who disagree with the Women’s March on every issue. That is political thought-bullying and condescension which polarizes civil discourse ab initio … it is a shame; this could be a powerful moment if done a different day, apart from political opportunism.”
I couldn’t say it any better.