thoughts, words, deeds

aftermath

The Sunday News! What's your take on the #MarchForOurLives events that have been happening all over the US today?

First off, I’m grateful that this particular protest is occurring on the weekend. With so many school age children participating in it, it would be irresponsible to hold the march on a weekday. It was bad enough when kids walked out of school (and as a side note, part of peaceful resistance is accepting the consequences of protest. People like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were jailed for participating in sit ins and walk outs. Well, if students want to participate in this walk out, they should accept the punishment that the school requires without arguing about it violating their right to protest.).

I’m not sure what these marches are going to do to change the underlying situation. When I googled “march for our lives” the first thing that came up was marchforourlives.com which troubles me, not that they shouldn’t have a website, but the fact that it’s a commercial website (.com instead of .org) means that part of the process is to make money. And that frustrates me. Funds are an important part of political change, but as a potential donor, I want assurances that the money I donate will be used responsibly. I have no guarantees based on the information they are giving out.

Underscoring that fact is the first tab on that webpage: Media, which leads to a dropdown menu with items: Merch, Press, Don’t put a price on our lives, and Amplify. The “Merch” selection leads to a store with t-shirts and bandanas designed for the march with proceeds going to “march for our lives.” The problem I see with that is that with the march over, there’s no saying where further proceeds will go. There is a still active link to at the right hand side of the home page. On the other hand, it took some wandering before I was able to find the manifesto for the march—the list of demands that they were taking to congress to do something about. This implies to me that the people who designed this webpage were more interested in making money and a splash than real, honest change.

Now, that’s nothing against the movement itself. The people who are committed to change and the students who are its voice are well intentioned for the most part, but this webpage tells me that they’re riding momentum and may not have the foundation necessary to support a long lasting group for change. It could be that they are building those foundations now, or it could be that they’re trying to move too quickly without the support (I don’t mean people who believe, I mean a solid, ideologically sound structure to support change) and that the movement itself will falter and die as quickly as it rose.

So, what does that mean? I don’t know. It could be that this march is going to spark change. There are some good points that the protesters have made. But in terms of practical, real world, effective solutions to the problem of school violence? I don’t know that it’s going to happen as a result of this.