February 14, 2019
On a day that is supposed to be suffused with the spirit of love, we are instead celebrating the somber one year anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Exactly one year ago, 17 people, including 14 children, were gunned down by a former student. In the year since, the students of Parkland, have built a tremendous movement, that has effected real change.
Their activism has led to the passage of new gun control laws in over half of the states across the country, from raising the age for gun purchases from 17 to 21, to banning bump stocks, to instituting red flag laws to prevent people with mental health issues from buying guns, (Source: “Parkland Shooting: Where Gun Control and School Safety Stand Today,” by Margaret Kramer and Jennifer Harlan, The New York Times, 2/13/19). The Parkland students built an intersectional movement, highlighting young Black and Latino activists from Chicago and East Los Angeles at their national March for Our Lives in Washington, which took place barely one month after the massacre. They mobilized young voters on their Road to Change Tour, contributing to a 10% increase in youth turnout in the 2018 midterms (Source: ibid). The Parkland student activists have been an inspirational example of how to turn grief and love into transformative action.
And yet, the adults have failed them. These are children and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas kids are just a fraction of the thousands of children whose lives have been scarred by gun violence. Our approach to keeping our children safe has been a macabre mix of surveillance measures and armed guards, making schools more like prisons than places of learning, (Source: “Schools are spending billions on high tech security. But are students any safer?” by Jon Schuppe, NBCNews.com, 5/20/18). A Washington Post study found that 4 million children, including some as young as six, are being traumatized by mandatory lock down drills, (Source: “School lockdowns: How many American children have been traumatized?” by Steven Rich and John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post, 12/26/18).
In the year since Parkland, nearly 1200 children have died from gun violence, not to mention the adults like those murdered by an anti-Semitic terrorist at the Tree of Life Synagogue, or the women killed at a yoga studio by a misogynistic murderer in Tallahassee, Florida.
None of this has spurred those in Congress to act. Rather than working to give our young people the childhood they deserve, they are working instead to acculturate them to an environment of perpetual war. In my home state of New Jersey, they are debating using prison guards to secure the schools (Source: “Terrified of school shootings, New Jersey now wants prison guards to protect kids,” by Adam Clark, NJ.com). Betsy DeVos’ response has been to overturn regulations designed to address racial disparities in school discipline, even though none of the school shooters were African American (Source: “Trump Officials Plan to Rescind Obama Era School Discipline Policies,” by Erica L. Green and Katie Benner, The New York Times, 12/17/18).
These are the policies of people who derive such a pornographic pleasure from violence that they can’t even conceive of bringing peace into the lives of our children. They would rather protect the right of thin-skinned, hate filled men to bolster their egos at the point of a gun, than to save the lives of our children. Today, I have only one question: ““Where is the love?”
#MSDStrong
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