MANSFIELD: March for Our Lives

The half-million (some say a million +) mostly young people who rallied in our nation’s capital under the banner of “March for Our Lives” on Saturday had me glued to the TV for a good part of the afternoon on Saturday. And the sincerity, passion and dedication exhibited by these future leaders of our nation brought occasional tears to my eyes. This was truly the best example of democracy in action.

Never mind that supporters of the NRA and the Washington gun lobby discounted the event (and the 85 sibling events around the country and the world) and immediately began plotting to defuse the dissent. These young folk are on the cusp of revolutionizing politics as we know it in this country. One of the beautiful things about being young is that youth doesn’t impose artificial limitations on themselves, limitations that are borne of life’s failures. Nor do young people allow others to limit their aspirations by the assigning of the constraints of their own abilities to this new generation.

Will this be a cakewalk? Certainly not — but the young people I listened to on Saturday are well aware of this. They already know that changing our national mindset on weapons is going to be akin to turning a steamship, something that is done slowly and with great effort. But these young people are down for that; they are deeply committed.

Throughout the ages, change has always been the provenance of youth. As one speaker on Saturday noted, Joan of Arc was a 17-year-old peasant girl when she began to inspire French forces in the Hundred Years War against English occupation. A war the French won.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Trump played golf while the youth of our nation were forcefully speaking out about a life-and-death issue, an issue on which they have the most skin in the game. It’s their lives that are being lost.

And the beautiful thing about Saturday’s rally was the complete diversity of the long line of speakers. And the issue wasn’t solely gun violence in schools; there were many voices of people from inner-city neighborhoods that gave testament in regards to the devastating impact of street gunplay.

Black, white, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race students all alternated at the microphone to lend their voices to the choir that ended with a crescendo; with all of the speakers, singers, musicians coming together — sans adults — to put the nation and politicians on notice that “enough is a goddamn enough.”

Of course, many elected officials will continue to whistle past the graveyard. They are so firmly in the pocket of the gun lobby they don’t know how to extricate themselves, and many simply don’t care to, since they are true believers in the cult of weapons that has held America enthralled since its inception. But their days are numbered, even if they don’t care to acknowledge the fact.

The only thing that can slow the efforts of these young people is if they continue the old ways of their parents. Case in point, while the event in Washington was completely egalitarian and inclusive, the photo of the event held in Cleveland (that was on the front page of the PD on Sunday) showed five young people holding the “March for Our Lives” banner as they demonstrated on Public Square. The only problem was, all of them were white (except for one that might — just might — have been Hispanic).

This is so typically Cleveland.

Naturally, the organizers will say they didn’t know any young people of color, and that is probably true. But it was a widely known fact that students of color at schools like John F. Kennedy on Harvard Avenue were actively organizing and speaking out on the issue. It behooved organizers of Cleveland’s event to make sure the leadership of the rally here in Cleveland was inclusive. Indeed, the overall success of the movement that’s underway is contingent upon such diversity.

From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.

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One Response to “MANSFIELD: March for Our Lives”

  1. Reginald Carter

    I wholeheartedly agree!

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