Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Wisdom of elders echoes
Grandparents teaching — and learning — side by side with teen activists
Led by the mourning but mobilized students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, young people will protest gun violence at the March for Our Lives demonstrations in Washington, D.C., Parkland and across the nation Saturday.
New to this kind of public opposition, these young marchers won’t find much practical advice from their parents, mostly members of the coddled Gen X era who are unskilled at organized dissent.
Instead, it’s the generation of the students’ grandparents, the Boomers who marched as young activists 50 years ago, who can tell them how it is on the front lines of challenging the government for policy change. Grandparents such as Boynton Beach resident Elin Shusterman, who made her first civil-rights march across the Brooklyn Bridge as a 15-year-old, and nearly 55 years later sat paralyzed by the phone waiting for news that her two granddaughters, stu-
dents at Stoneman Douglas, were unharmed.
On Saturday in Boynton Beach, Shusterman has organized a March for Our Lives demonstration for South Florida seniors, a stationary protest with ailing knees and hips in mind called Stand Up for Our Grandkids. It will take place from 10:30 a.m. to noon outside the Grove, her 55-plus community on West Boynton Beach Boulevard at the intersection with Florida’s Turnpike. Shusterman and friends have created a selection of signs that will be available while they last, but bring your own chair.
Many of the seniors who committed to taking part in Stand Up for Our Grandkids will do so despite their infirmities, some in wheelchairs, some with limited ability to walk very far or stand very long, she says.
“They just can’t take much more of this. It’s just so heartbreaking. How many tears do you have left?” Shusterman asks, fighting back tears. “How many kids can you just sit and watch get killed? And it’s for nothing. It’s for goddamn nothing.”
‘More sensible than we were’
A retired advertising and marketing executive who has lived in South Florida for more than 25 years, Shusterman, 69, is no stranger to protest. A few years after her march across the bridge, she was at Hunter College in New York, chained with other students in the college president’s office to protest the Vietnam War.
She also is no stranger to the gun debate, creating the Committee Against Gun Violence five years ago, weeks after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Shusterman’s generation eventually helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, and she believes the Stoneman Douglas students can effect similar change.
“I think they can. I’m certainly hoping for it. It’s a miracle what happened in Florida, that we got the new law [SB 7026, the gun and school safety legislation signed March 9 by Gov. Rick Scott]. I do feel that the fact that Scott is running for the Senate is a big reason that it happened. If he was not running for senator, I don’t know if it would have happened. But, hey, I’ll take it.
“Obviously, they’re extremely intelligent and very articulate,” Shusterman says of the #NeverAgain kids. “They are very focused on what they want to do, and they’re doing it. They’re also to some degree more sensible than we were. They’re trying more to work within the system. Whereas a lot of what we did was trying to be antiestablishment. A lot of us wanted to tear things down. … And with us, there was this whole movement that evolved from the Beat Generation and had to do with Timothy Leary and idolization of the drug movement. Drugs and alcohol got in the way and hurt people. … I don’t see that with these kids. They seem extremely clearheaded. If they stay on track and stay clearheaded, they can do whatever they want.”
‘This is going to change their lives’
In 1960, Judy Guskin and her then-husband, Al, were students who listened to an impromptu speech at the University of Michigan by Sen. John F. Kennedy, in the final days of his presidential campaign, and turned his mention of a volunteer corps of young Americans into a personal pledge. They wrote an essay about that pledge on a diner napkin that night and turned it in to the school paper, edited by 18-year-old Tom Hayden, the future social and political activist. The publication of that essay inspired a movement at the University of Michigan and beyond, eventually reaching Kennedy, who doubled down on the idea in a major speech less than a week before the election, calling for an American “peace corps.” After the election, Guskin was called to Washington, where she met with Kennedy and went to work setting up training and recruitment for the Peace Corps.
After being one of the first Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand, the Brooklyn native had a long career working on racial equality and reform in education, and is now a documentary filmmaker and author — she just published a historical novel about Native Americans in colonial America titled “Longing To Be Free” — living in Hallandale Beach with her husband, Martin Rosenthal, also a filmmaker. She has two daughters and four grandchildren, two in high school.
Guskin says her college activism altered the direction of her life in ways she could never have anticipated, and she believes the same will be true for Stoneman Douglas students.
“This is going to change their lives. If they feel, even a little bit, that they had something meaningful that they were able to do after this great tragedy, that will change their lives,” Guskin says. “It should make them feel that if they’re persistent — and if they believe strongly in something, they should be persistent, and it may take time, maybe years — then they can get more successes in whatever it is they are passionate about. That’s what happened to me. You know, you got to meet a president in a couple of weeks’ time. Well, that’s going to make you feel anything might be possible, that you didn’t know was possible. I was hired to set up Peace Corps. I went to Washington. Then I volunteered. I went to Thailand, and it changed my life. I learned Thai, which I can still speak. I changed my career goals. … It made me not afraid to contact anybody.”
‘They’ve had the experience’
Neil Katz is a semiretired corporate lawyer who has lived in Boynton Beach full-time for the past four years with his wife, Evalyn, a retired medical social worker. While at NYU Law School, Katz spent 1966-69 at antiwar marches, including the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which in 1969 drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to the Mall in Washington, D.C. Katz was among the corps of law students assigned to meet with wary congressmen, which they managed to do.
“The atmosphere was a lot different in those days,” he says. “There was a great deal of anti-liberal and antiwhat they considered hippies and communists, as they called people who were against the war. But there was still a recognition, particularly law students had a certain amount of respectability if things were being done in a nonconfrontational manner. So appointments were made. [Katz drew Nebraska Sen. Roman Hruska, not a man receptive to antiwar sentiment.] He might have given us 10 or 15 minutes, but we were given an opportunity to convey our point of view.”
Katz says the Stoneman Douglas students have the ability to communicate and carry with them an undeniable authority on the subject of gun violence by having been witnesses. They are deserving of the same respect he and other law students received 50 years ago, he says.
“These are kids who are capable of expressing the message themselves. They’ve had the experience. They’re not indirectly experienced by it, they are directly experienced by it and they are capable of reacting and responding to it,” Katz says. “I’m hoping that they can take the momentum that they seem to have picked up and pass it along, not just to their generation but particularly to people of voting age, because they have a capability to use social media and communicate with people in a way that we never had.
“I think they’re doing a very good thing,” he adds. “Of course, if they were doing something like, say, Charlottesville rioters, I wouldn’t be so favorably disposed, but they are taking advantage of the technology and the means at their disposal to do something that, hopefully, might finally tip the scales in terms of getting something accomplished. … They were effective in influencing the vote on the Florida bill. I don’t know that the Florida bill is a great thing, and it can’t be the end of it, in my opinion, and I don’t think they feel that it can be the end of it. But it might not have been passed at all if they didn’t have the effective communication at their disposal.”