young & old are united
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — They were standing at the entrance to Dreher Park on Southern Blvd., less than 2 miles from where President Donald J. Trump lives at Mar-a-Lago, and they were holding their signs about gun violence and wearing their “March For Our Lives” T-shirts and buttons, and it was the same here as it was everywhere on this thrilling day for America, with the old following the young.
Diane Scricca, from New Hyde Park, once the principal at Elmont Memorial High School, is standing here with old friends named Art Lozzi and his wife Maureen who live up the road in Singer Island. Diane Scricca, who is 67, wore her own “March For Our Lives” button. Art Lozzi wore a blue T-shirt with the same message across the front. “I haven’t marched since the 60s,” Diane Scricca said. “I am humbled and almost humiliated,” Art Lozzi said, “that the rest of us needed these kids to come along and carry the ball this way. But now that they have, I’m here to fall in line with them.”
This was a day when making America great wasn’t some cheap political slogan. This was a day when young people and old people showed the best of their country, raising their voices over the constant roar of gunfire, the worst and most recent example having been a half-hour from here on Valentine’s Day at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
This was not a political message on this splendid, historic day in America as much as an American one, sent to all politicians who have done nothing on guns and somehow still hold jobs, at least for the time being. These cowards were told, most eloquently by children tired of seeing other children shot dead in this country, that if the ones in charge in Washington, including the friend of the National Rifle Association in the White House, won’t change on guns then they will be changed out.
Less than six weeks after Parkland, the kids who began this movement in a park down the street from Marjory Stoneman Douglas now inspire more than a million to take to the streets of America. They keep coming, these kids. These were not just protesters on this day. These were future voters. They will continue to take to the streets on guns the way the young once took to the streets and did more to end the Vietnam War than any politician ever did, including President Lyndon Johnson, who quit on his stool once the kids came for him in the 60s.
When Maureen Lozzi was asked at Dreher Park where she and her husband were from, she first said, “We’re like everybody else today. We’re from everywhere.”
Her husband was then asked where they were going. He smiled and said, “Well, we’d like to walk all the way to Trump’s house.”
You looked around on Southern Blvd. and saw elderly people holding one side of a big, handwritten banner that said, “March For Our Lives” and what looked like their grandchildren holding the other. There was a woman carrying another homemade sign with the message “Love Prevails,” dodging traffic in the long traffic jam heading towards the ocean on Southern, to the place where you take the left to head up to Ocean Blvd. to Mar-a-Lago, and what you noticed immediately about the woman was that she was not only running, she was smiling, as if carried along by the energy of this moment. She ended up standing next to a simple blue sign from Marjory Stoneman Douglas stuck in the ground, like a flag stuck on a hill that an army had just taken.
Diane Scricca, whose life in schools involved educating high school students the same ages as the ones leading this march and this movement, looked around at the huge crowd at Dreher Park and said, “For the first time in a long time in this country, I honestly feel as if we might be on the right track.”
The cars slowly kept moving east on Southern Blvd. There were flashing police lights everywhere up ahead and a cop with a bullhorn kept asking that people keep the entrance to the park clear. People would get off Southern and go left and park on Paseo Andalusa and Merrick, and then carry their signs into the park. Trump’s motorcade took a different route than it usually takes after another round of golf. It was because he knew the protesters were here waiting for him, and should have driven past them, and seen with his own eyes what the greatness of America looks like outside those airplane hangars where he still drives them mad.
“It’s always the kids who show us the way,” Billie Jean King said later on the phone, having marched in New York City on this day with her old friend Paul McCartney, who spoke of having lost John Lennon to gun violence. “You know the most beautiful thing I saw today? Voters.”
They came over the hill like the First Army on this day, in Washington, D.C., in New York and LA and big cities and small towns in between and even around the corner from Trump’s house, came with what a proud old activist named Billie Jean King called “passion and purpose.” They have taken the lead on guns, for good. Follow them now or get the hell out of the way.