Brandon Soderberg
Anything this big can't be that good, you'd like to think.
Last year's Women's March was rightfully criticized for blinding whiteness and a recalcitrant approach to intersectionality. But after hundreds of thousands of people turned out for last weekend's March for Our Lives in Washington D.C., it's obvious the Women’s March march set a Trump-era precedent for large protest — and the importance of that is incalculable.
Parkland's student activists — a stunning example of the “don't mourn, organize” ethos — have their shit together when it comes to what to say about guns in this country, while Democrats five times their age leading the so-called #resistance just don't and never will. The march called attention to school shootings and the gun lobby — then kept on pivoting to include any and all victims of gun violence, acknowledging bias, privilege, and racial disparity along the way. It took the Women's March's homogeneity and tilted it towards intersectionality.
At its core, it was an anti-N.R.A. parade. That's a good thing, because the N.R.A. is a death cult and has nothing useful or sincere to say about gun rights. If an undercover video produced by Channel 4 exposed N.R.A. bigwigs meeting in the molten core of the planet, sacrificing animals and fellating AR-15s, would you really be surprised?
One of the 200,000 marchers there on Saturday was Nora Ludden. She knows firsthand how long the gun access and gun control debate has circled the drain. She's a survivor of the 1992 Simon's Rock shooting, in which 18 year-old Wayne Lo, a student at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts, murdered two people on campus and wounded four after purchasing a semi-automatic rifle at a sporting goods store.
“This terrible thing has been going on for a very long time; I was a teenager myself when there was a shooting at my school,” Ludden said. “The shooter was able to get a gun very easily with no waiting period or background check or anything.”
Ludden is one of many Simon's Rock alumni who signed a petition demanding “more access to mental health services and less access to weapons” following the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. The Newtown shooting happened exactly 20 years after the Simon's Rock shooting — Dec. 14, 2012 and Dec. 14, 1992.
“Now, you see this continue for decades,” Ludden said. “To see my kids still dealing with the same thing I did is just really heartbreaking.”
You've surely seen the march's speeches by now, especially from Parkland's David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, but don't forget about Edna Chavez. The 17-year-old South Central Los Angeles activist paid tribute to her brother Ricardo, who was shot and killed outside their home. Chavez culture-jammed much of the boring, big-march bullshit with personal-is-political poetry, making clear how school shootings intertwine with the kinds of gun violence she and thousands of others have endured in cities such as Baltimore and Chicago.
“You hear a 'pop' thinking they were fireworks, they weren't — you see melanin on your brother's skin turned grey. Ricardo was his name, can y'all say it with me?” Chavez asked.
Later, Chavez challenged “solutions” such as more police in schools.
“Zero tolerance policies do not work,” Chavez said. “They make us feel like criminals.”
The Guardian recently published “Our manifesto to fix America's gun laws,” written by the staff of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper. One of the demands was “increase funding for school security,” and here was Chavez, calling “B.S.” on it.
Before South Side Chicago rapper Vic Mensa performed at the March for Our Lives, he mentioned Sacramento's Stephon Clark, shot 20 times by police in his own backyard on March 18, holding a cell phone cops claim they thought was a gun (they also muted their body cameras during the deadly encounter). He also brought up Decynthia Clements, from Elgin, not far from Chicago, who was shot and killed after an extended chase with the police wherein she set the inside of her car on fire and also lunged at cops with a steak knife. An imperfect victim of police violence, but a victim nonetheless.
Police have killed 244 people this year. Clark, whose death it does not seem will go away quietly, was shot and killed barely more than a week ago — there have been 19 police shootings since then.
The lesson: Cops are guns—instrumentalized, surveilling means of destruction.
Brandon Soderberg is the former editor of the Baltimore City Paper, former news editor of the Baltimore Beat, and the author of Daddy Lessons: A Country Music Zine for the Trumpocalypse. You can order it at daddylessons.bandcamp.com. Follow him on Twitter @notrivia.
