Civil Rights

O Romeo . . .

Hand me my armadillo mandolin.
I need to sing.
Turn on the Transporter Machine to the moment
shimmering alongside this one.
Somewhere wind is blowing
trailing a wake of sunlight
through a hillside of spring grass.
I see a sailboat leaning
thin as a butterfly
under a bruised sky, so piercingly white
everybody’s stopped on the Embarcadero
peering over their steering wheel
trying to remember where they were going.

The smoke hasn’t gone away
this time, new fires are breaking out,
even in Oregon, and the fire season
is just beginning.
Ash flecks the cars, the leaves,
plumes of it, risen thirty thousand feet,
blocked out the sun, blocked the blue rays,
turned the air Martian orange.

In the City, fog darkens it further,
streetlights are still on. It’s like midnight—
at noon. In the East Bay the sun
is a small, orange disc, a eucharist
rising from the demonic region of civil war,
to hang over the battlefield in the dawn haze,
the weeds and crushed dandelions
beginning to lift, in hesitant, springing upticks,
to waver over the bodies. One soldier is propped up,
as imagined in The Red Badge of Courage,
leaning against a tree as if taking a break,
jaw slack, mouth agape,
ants passing each other along his lips
as if along a window sill. He’s come back to life
on a chair and holding a cardboard sign
next to a crooked blue tent under the overpass.
The air knows what has happened,
the answer no longer blowing in the wind.
It’s in the smoke that doesn’t move.

We’re so divided now, it’s no wonder
civil war comes to mind. What can you do
in this bizarre light and toxic ash
but close the windows?
Going out’s as bad as staying in,
everybody contracted to whatever channel
profits by reinforcing his opinion.

On top of killing the earth
this shit is ruining my poetry.

Our atmosphere of war is appropriate, people
shot in the back by police, most generals
afraid to speak out, dictatorship nearly in place.
Nobody’s in control but a creep,
extolled as the Messiah, by mostly good people
bewildered by neglect and damaged
self-esteem, when what’s
really in control is the burning earth
which is burning
and burning
and even now, I’m about to get in my car
drive across the bridge to meet someone
for coffee. We’re all complicit
in this march toward global extinction.
Inertia is a motherfucker.

Going outside now, the news says,
is like smoking eight cigarettes.
We’re a race of suicidal idiots
conditioned to band together in small groups
that circle each other warily, despise each other,
and we often don’t even know why.
Perhaps we mistake this huddling for love.

Romeo and Juliet are dead,
having dared to love, having finally united
their feuding families, the Capulets
with the hated Montagues, in mutual grief,
by killing themselves.

Where does that leave us,
who are still in love, from different tribes,
still alive, and still needing
fresh air?

How the Fourteenth Amendment Shapes America (Part 1)

by Charles Entrekin

2018 marks the 150th Anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment and Sisyphus will be doing a series examining its import. The influence of the Amendment on the controversies and interpretations of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court is an important and complex study. In this issue, we examine the amendment’s influence on women.

“[The Fourteenth Amendment] shapes almost every issue we debate today: immigration, racial and gender equality, voter suppression, free speech, corporations and federal power. Its history destroys the notion that freedom grew steadily over time — that the founders bestowed liberty on white men, which was gradually extended to others. Rather, the amendment reinvented freedom. It established birthright citizenship, required ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ of the law for everyone, and put the federal government in the business of policing liberty. It removed race and ethnicity from the legal deﬁnition of American identity…

“The 14th Amendment is felt by all of us, every day. If it did not invent freedom, it transformed and strengthened it, codifying a universal deﬁnition of individual rights and national identity that has been an example to the world. But the failings of those who wrote it linger on. Many of us still have not internalized the idea that an American can look like anyone in the world. Whoever calls the police on a peaceful, unarmed black or brown person is acting in a long, grim tradition. Complaints about the immigration of Muslims, Latin Americans or people from ‘shithole countries’ restate the original arguments against the 14th as opening the doors to ‘heathens’ and ‘pagans.’ Even debates over the intrusiveness of the federal government and the rights of corporations are rooted in the amendment that forever altered Washington’s role in American life.” says Pulitzer Prizewinning Author T.J. Stiles in an OpEd for the New York Times.

“As T.J. Stiles notes, the 14th Amendment was a much-needed response to a racist backlash in the aftermath of emancipation from slavery. It also marks the first time the word “male” was introduced into the Constitution, in the context of voting rights. It took another constitutional amendment, more than 50 years later, for women to get the right to vote.

“While in recent years the 14th Amendment has been expanded by the Supreme Court to give women, as well as men, far greater protection from sex discrimination, it has not been an effective avenue to justice for women suffering from unequal treatment, including pay inequity, pregnancy discrimination and gender-based violence.

“Women were intentionally left out of the Constitution when it was drafted, and the resulting second-class status of women has given rise to a culture in which the abusive treatment of women has been allowed and enabled.

“The Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced almost a hundred years ago, is now again gaining traction with recent state ratifications by Nevada and Illinois and with the wave of protest engendered by the #MeToo movement.

The Equal Rights Amendment is long overdue and a fitting constitutional response,” responds Jessica Neuwirth. Neuwirth is the founder and co-president of the E.R.A. Coalition, and the author of Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for an Equal Rights Amendment Is Now.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States— including former slaves—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” One of three amendments passed during the Reconstruction era to abolish slavery and establish civil and legal rights for black Americans, it would become the basis for many landmark Supreme Court decisions over the years.

The Thirteenth Amendment (banning slavery), the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment (ensuring the right to vote) did not, however, support equal rights under the law because, for the first time, the word “male” was inserted into the language of the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment States: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It did not, however, include women as citizens.

However, the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States began in the early 19^th century. Many of its supporters were Union abolitionists supporting the Civil War to bring an end to slavery, fully expecting to return to the cause after the war and they were outraged by the Civil War Amendments because of the obvious language favoring male voters. They lobbied, without success, for a suffragette amendment and movement spilt the factions of the suffragettes and the abolitionists in the Women’s Rights Movement. Women would not get the vote until Congress passed the 19^th Amendment in 1920, another 52 years.

Below we outline some of the most important Supreme Court decisions for women that are based on the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Bradwell v. Illinois (1869) Myra Colby Bradwell (February 12, 1831 – February 14, 1894) was a pioneer woman lawyer, the first woman in the United States to practice law, author of legislation for women’s rights; first woman member of the Illinois Bar Association; and founding member of the Illinois Woman’s Press Association, the oldest organization of professional women writers.

Bradwell formed the American Women’s Suffrage Movement with Lucy Sone, Julia Ward Howe, and Frederick Douglass. In 1868, Bradwell formed the Chicago Legal News as editor and business manager. She advocated for married women’s property rights and drafted laws protecting women’s earnings and the protection of widows.

In 1869, she passed the bar with high honors only to be denied a license. The Illinois Supreme Court found her to be “disabled” as a married woman, because she did not have separate legal existence outside of her marriage and was unable enter into contracts (femme covert law). In 1872, she appealed the lower court decision (a rehearing found simply that she was disqualified for being a woman) to the United States Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court upheld the decision.

U.S. v. Anthony (1873) Susan Brownwell Anthony (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906) was an activist, reformer, teacher, and lecturer and key spokesperson and founder of the Equal Rights Association (1866) and editor and publisher of the Revolution. Anthony co-founded (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton) the National Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a vote in New York in the Presidential election, claiming that the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment already permitted women the vote. She said, “We no longer petition legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected ‘citizen’s right’.” She was arrested (along with 15 others), tried in the United States District Court, found guilty, and fined $100. She refused to pay.

Minor v. Happersett (1874) Virginia Louisa Minor (March 27, 1824 – August 14, 1894) supported the Union effort in the Civil War. After the war, Minor became involved in the woman’s suffrage movement and founded the first organization in the United States dedicated to the single issue of women’s voting rights.

In October 1872, Minor attempted to register to vote in Missouri. The registrar, Reese Happersett, turned her down. Claiming her rights were violated, her husband Francis Minor sued in the Missouri Supreme Court (because of the femme covert law, Virginia Minor could not sue on her own behalf). The Minors’ brief argued that, “There can be no half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen in the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, or to none.”

The US Supreme Court, in an unanimous opinion written by the Chief Justice Morrison Waite, found:

women are citizens of the United States, and were even before the Fourteenth Amendment passed
the right of suffrage — the right to vote — is not a “necessary privilege and immunity” to which all citizens are entitled
the Fourteenth Amendment did not add the right of suffrage to citizenship privileges
the Fifteenth Amendment was required to be sure voting rights were not “denied or abridged … on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” — in other words, the amendment was not necessary if citizenship conferred voting rights
women’s suffrage was explicitly excluded in nearly every state either in the constitution or in its legal code; no state had been excluded from joining the Union for lack of women’s voting rights, including states re-entering the Union after the Civil War, with newly written constitutions
the US had made no objection when New Jersey explicitly withdrew women’s suffrage rights in 1807
arguments about the need for women’s suffrage were irrelevant to their decisions

Reed v. Reed (1971) Separated couple Sally and Cecil Reed’s adopted son committed suicide without a will and with an estate of less than $1000. Both filed petitions seeking appointment of the son’s estate.

According to Idaho Code 15-312, the classes of persons “entitled to administer the estate of one who dies intestate” in order of preference are: 1. Surviving spouse 2. Children 3. Father or mother 4. brothers 5. sisters, etc. Idaho Code 15-314 states that if there are several people equally entitled, then “males must be preferred to females and relatives of the whole to those of the half blood.”

In 1971, Reed v. Reed became the first U.S. Supreme Court case to declare sex discrimination a violation of the 14^th Amendment.

In the Reed v. Reed opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that “the Idaho Code cannot stand in the face of the 14th Amendment’s command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction.” The decision was without dissent.

ERA feminists noted that it took more than a century for the United States Supreme Court to recognize the Fourteenth Amendment in support of Women’s Rights. One of the lawyers for the appellant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called it a “turning point case.”

Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe in the 1973 court case, left, and her attorney Gloria Allred hold hands as they leave the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC., Wednesday, April 26, 1989 after sitting in while the court listened to arguments in a Missouri abortion case. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Roe v. Wade (1973) Norma Nelson was high school dropout from Texas who met and married Elwood McCorvey at the age of 16. The child from their union was raised by her mother. Her second child was raised by the father of the child. Her third pregnancy landed her as the plaintiff in one of the most famous United States Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth century.

Her participation in the case was orchestrated by her lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. They were looking for a woman who wanted an abortion but couldn’t obtain one. At the time, abortion was illegal in Texas and “Jane Roe” did not have the financial ability to travel to another state.

The United States Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Roe. The Court based its decision on the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Past decisions in family law were protected under the implicit right to privacy in the Bill of Rights but Roe v Wade was primarily determined on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case is a turning point in women’s reproductive rights.

Data from History.com & ThoughtCo

AMENDMENT XIV

SECTION 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

SECTION 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

SECTION 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

SECTION 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

SECTION 5

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Further discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment will be in Issue 5.4: Inequality.

March 24, 2018: March for our Lives

by Charles Entrekin

Ed: It is hard to not be moved by the events on the weekend of March 24, 2018, primarily because the eloquence came from the youth of our culture. Several of our West Coast authors were moved to contribute by sharing their experiences from several different March for our Lives events: Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Nevada City (CA), and Eugene (OR). Eternally young eighty-ish photographer Barry Shapiro (see “Oakland’s General Strike and the March to Close the Ports“) climbed a wall to get a better angle of the Oakland High School March for our Lives, fell, and was hospitalized for a brief period, where he was moved to pen a piece about the aesthetics of aging. Look for it in a future issue. I have included an excerpt from Barry’s 2011 article because it still seems (unfortunately) relevant today.

March for Our Lives: Mini Photo Essay
OAKLAND, CA: Barry Shapiro

Excerpt from Barry’s 2011’s piece, “Oakland’s General Strike…”
“It seems very long ago that we activists fought with fervor and hope, believing that we could change America for the better. And indeed, in many ways we did. Our legacy of civil rights and women’s rights and programs that attempted to eliminate poverty still stand. At least in some measure. Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve watched in horror: the wars on women, growing income inequality, the decimation of the personal/family wealth of people of color, the mortgage loan scandals, the pollution of the political process by uncontrolled and un-accountable amounts of private/corporate spending, threatening to wipe away all of our gains. Instead of hope, we began to experience despair–feeling powerless to stop the Right’s money and influence.”

The Next Civil Rights Struggle Will be Fought by our Own Kids
NEVADA CITY, CA: Dr. Jeff Kane

Reminiscing on the nineteen-sixties, I told my kids, “Man, did you miss an amazing decade: the Vietnam War, civil rights, emerging feminism, eco-consciousness, psychedelics…”

They replied, “Don’t worry. We’ll get our own amazing decade.”

And here it is. Our younger citizens, recognizing they’re getting short-changed, are creating a movement that will transform America as much as we gray longhairs did. Whoever thought our own kids would drive the next civil rights struggle?

I’m writing this on March 24, the day of the national “March For Our Lives.” Young people are demanding protection from gun violence, but want more, too. They resent the environmental cesspool we’re leaving them. They want the affordable education necessary to any democracy. They want an effective voice in their future.

A society that cares about its children plans generations ahead. We haven’t. Our relative neglect of our descendants’ welfare constitutes de facto national child abuse. It’s as though we’ve told our kids, “Sure, we’ve been wasteful and thoughtless, but damn, we had a great party. Now you clean it up.” Little wonder that as they hide in school closets, many students think adults might not be right in the head.

That issue arose recently when our president proclaimed that the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a manifestation of poor mental health. He’s absolutely right, and far more widely than he recognizes. Poor mental health describes:

legislators who believe “thoughts and prayers” adequately address mass murder;
electoral tolerance of Congress members who are shamelessly on the NRA dole;
a president who canceled a regulation that made it harder for mentally ill people to purchase guns;
a nation that has yet to develop a no-nonsense attitude—in addition to law—that keeps firearms from those who shouldn’t have access. (Toddlers, for example: 2-4 year-olds mishandling guns have been responsible for more deaths since 9/11 than foreign terrorists);
blind fear—of crime, of terrorism, of immigrants, of our own government. In the United States there’s one gun for every man, woman, and child. With all that weaponry, what are we so afraid of? Violent crime has actually been decreasing. As for armed defense against a tyrannical federal government—a government that’s arguably the best-armed and most ruthless in world history—consider the outcomes at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Malheur Refuge;
those of us willing to live permanently, literally, under the gun—thinking twice about attending a concert or going to church or a shopping mall, not to mention sending our kids to school.

Young people have seen how deficient mental health can decay morality, and not just in relation to gun violence. Why else would we adults accept stratospheric education costs, pollution-caused illnesses, perpetual wars, and the planet’s catastrophic heating?

We’re not talking about schizophrenia here, or bipolar disorder, or even disabling neurosis. We’re talking about everyday denial and delusion, and abdication of responsibility. Noticing this gross decline in standards, our kids are having none of it. Passionate and articulate, they mean to get us back on track by demanding their birthrights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And they’ll need our support.

March for Our Lives: Beloved Community as Local and National
EUGENE, OREGON: Carter McKenzie

My youngest daughter was two years old at the time of the shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. I remembered this when listening to Betina Lynn, a survivor of that shooting, speak outside of the Federal Courthouse in Eugene at the March for Our Lives event yesterday. She courageously addressed a gathering of what became more than 6000 marchers, speaking of the ongoing trauma she has endured from the gunshots that severely wounded her and killed two of her classmates in 1998, and stating the anger she feels when yet another school shooting occurs.

I remember carrying my daughter to a chain link fence bordering Thurston High School and laying down flowers in grief and shock days after that shooting. Yellow, late spring flowers, among many, many more flowers and messages of condolences along the fence. In memory—in incomprehension. I knew a teacher at that school. He and his family were my neighbors. This violence was not remote but affecting people in my world. Affecting how I saw threats to the future of children I knew, including my own.

None of us is free until we all are free. None of our children are safe until all of our children are safe.

Yesterday’s March for Our Lives: more than five weeks after the shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and two months before the 20th anniversary of the Thurston shooting. Also nearing the 3rd anniversary of the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. I remember that October day—the incongruous beauty of the vine maple leaves taking on colors of fire in the mountains.

Yesterday was evidence of the leadership of the youth in this country. Evidence of their vision and courage and holy rage. It was the day 11-year-old Naomi Wadler, speaking to hundreds of thousands of marchers in Washington D.C., recognized the 18th person lost to gun violence in recent weeks: Courtlin Arrington, whose death on March 7 from a school shooting at Huffman High School in Birmingham, Alabama, had not garnered central media attention.

Courtlin Arrington, a seventeen-year-old African American woman who was two months away from becoming a nursing assistant, was buried yesterday.

The march in Eugene was made possible by weeks of hard work by area high school students. Students who are beautiful, intelligent, and passionate in their energy and vision. Leaders. They made this happen: a way to declare what is not acceptable—the subjection of school communities to the threat of gun violence. They made this happen: a way to declare the necessity of freeing all communities from such violence.

Yesterday, Betina Lynn reminded us that the brave youth leading in this protest cannot do it alone—“nor should we ask them to.”

(quote in final paragraph from The Register-Guard report on March for Our Lives event in Eugene, Sunday, March 25, 2018)

Carter’s new collection of poems Stem of Us will be released by Flowstone Press, Summer 2018.

My Experience at March for Our Lives
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: Martha Kendall

I turned the windshield wipers up to the max. The downpour couldn’t stop us. Destination? Downtown San Jose for the March for Our Lives. It rained on our parade, but that didn’t dampen our determination to end the gun violence in our country.

Friend Diana and her octogenarian mother Ruth from Tennessee (San Jose, CA)

My husband and I carpooled with another couple from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Near City Hall, we met up with two additional friends: Diana, who is a long-time pal, and her octogenarian mother Ruth, visiting from her home in rural Tennessee. Ruth said, “I grew up with guns when my family lived near the woods. My brother shot squirrels and deer that added to our food supply.” But she was as disgusted as the rest of us by the slaughter Americans now inflict on each other.

Umbrellas aloft, thousands of us walked the downtown streets. Participants included adults of all ages and affiliations, teens carrying banners, and little kids in strollers. There was no shortage of pussy hats, though hoods were the practical choice to protect against the rain.

Exuberance and affirmation had set the tone for the two women’s marches I’d previously attended in San Jose. The mood on March 24 felt more somber. Signs were clever and varied, but as one said, “This isn’t Left or Right. It’s Life or Death.” Many referred to the familiar “#Enough,” but Ruth and I agreed it’s way past “enough.” One sign said, “Lives, not bribes.” The NRA was accused of having “No Real Answers.” Another sign said, “’NRA, How many spokespeople does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer? ‘More guns.’”

After we drove home, the impact of the March for Our Lives continued. I posted a few photos on Facebook, and I was grief-stricken to read one of the responses. It came from a soft-spoken, generous innkeeper my husband and I had met a half dozen years ago in Louisiana when we were passing through on a bicycle trip. We wanted to try a Greek restaurant about five miles away, and he insisted on loaning us his car so we wouldn’t have to ride our bikes back in the dark. When we returned to the motel after a delicious dinner, he introduced us to his charming wife and friendly 20-year-old son. We had such a nice conversation that we became Facebook friends so we could keep in touch.

His comment on my Facebook post? “My son was killed by a bullet.”

The gun violence in America is sickeningly, terrifyingly abnormal. We must stop it, and the only way is with ballots, not more bullets.

March for Our Lives Rally
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: Diane Perea

The juxtaposition was striking: a young woman on the corner of Grove and Polk Street holding a sign that said, “DO NOT MILITARIZE OUR SCHOOLS!” while just a few yards away cops stood in the intersection in full military garb, prepared to deal with any violence that might arise from this protest at the San Francisco Civic Center. There were cops on top of buildings, there were helicopters circling overhead. Meanwhile, people of all ages, races and walks of life were pouring into the area, many carrying signs of their own. All with a single mission; to stop gun violence in this country.

Most of the speakers at this event were young people, articulate and passionate. Some shared their personal experiences with gun violence.

A high school senior from the Bayview District who, at 13 years of age, while walking her two younger sisters home from school, suddenly found herself in the midst of a shootout on the street. She spent the next several minutes on the ground, doing her best to shield her sisters from harm until the shooting stopped. To this day she suffers from PTSD, experiencing extreme fear and anxiety every time she hears a door slam or a car backfire.
A young woman who survived the mass shooting at Columbine High School back in 1999, talked about what it was like to be crammed into a small office with 60 other students, waiting until the shooting stopped and then waiting another four hours until the S.W.A.T. team came to escort them off campus.
A father who lost his son, a student at UC Santa Barbara, to a shooter on a rampage in Isla Vista in 2014.
A young adolescent described what it was like for her to have to rehearse school drills (since kindergarten) on what to do in case of a shooter.

For the people who spoke , gun violence is now part of their everyday, their normal. The Columbine High School shooting was 20 years ago and, rather than being an anomaly, it seems Columbine was just the beginning of mass shootings becoming more and more common in our country, at schools, movie theaters, dance clubs, concerts. But this movement is not just about mass shootings in public places. It is also about the fact that kids of color have been dealing with gun violence in their neighborhoods for a long, long time.

At that rally, I often found myself in tears. I felt sad that we adults and our political system have failed to keep our kids safe. These children have to take matters into their own hands now, they have to fight for their lives. They know they need to organize, speak out, and vote politicians out who choose money over the lives of citizens. They know bullshit when they see it, and they are not willing to accept this as normal anymore.

The energy and idealism of youth rang out that day, loud and clear. In speeches, poetry, and rap, there were pleas to register to vote, to withdraw investments in gun companies, to support gun regulation, to wake up. We older folks, worn down by the reality of life and the glacial movement of political action, find ourselves re-energized and in awe of this youthful movement.

March for our Lives, City Hall (San Francisco CA)

Politics is a hard slow slog and our political machine’s wheels are too often greased by money. But something has shifted; this is more than just a political movement. It is a social movement, a cultural shift. This is raising the voice that says guns are not cool, they are not okay, they are not normal. This is raising the stigma of gun ownership to a new level. My hope is that this movement represents a pushback on the gun industry, much like the anti-smoking movement was a pushback on the tobacco industry. As our politicians take their time to wrestle with this issue, the cultural wave is where the power resides.

And this is a beautiful thing to watch.