Demanding “Never Again” and “Enough Is Enough” to gun violence, and shouting “We Call BS” to the arguments against changing gun laws, a new generation of young people has been sparked into activism as a shooters’ bullets cut down their peers and teachers at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
Within a very short time, they have captured the imagination and admiration of those of us who have long hoped and fought for policy initiatives to bring an end to the senseless over-availability of firearms that kills an estimated 33,000 people annually in the U.S.
But as with all social movements for progressive social change, a strong and powerful opposition stands in the way. Member of the conservative political Right, many who represent the interests of gun manufacturers and their lobbyists, have long engaged in and are continuing to wage war against gun safety advocates, even when, especially when, these advocates are young people.
During this Trumpian-inspired cultural moment within the context of declarations of “fake news,” “conspiracy theories,” “witch hunts,” and verifiable distortions and lies in reaction to anything and everything reported that goes against their agendas and “values,” the backlash to derail, by demeaning and impugning the integrity and motivation of these new youth advocates, was predictable in its speed and veracity.
People in the extreme crevices of the Right through many centrists accuse these young people of serving as pawns or coconspirators of the political Left’s anti-gun agenda, that they are mere puppets who have been coached what to say and how to say it.
On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called out the student activists: “Everything they’re doing is right out of the Democrat Party’s various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the N.R.A. and guns.”
Donald Trump Jr. took to twitter to attack 17-year-old David Hogg, one of the student leaders from Douglas High School, for criticizing the Trump administration to protect his father, a former F.B.I agent. Trump Jr. referred to a YouTube video calling David Hogg an “Outspoken Trump-Hating School Shooting Survivor is Son of FBI Agent; MSM Helps Prop Up Incompetent Bureau.”
Trump Jr. also admired a tweet connected to an article by the far-right website, True Pundit, which referred to David Hogg as “the kid who has been running his mouth about how Donald Trump and the GOP are teaming to help murder high school kids by upholding the Second Amendment.”
The Right also refers to David and the other student gun safety activists as “crisis actors.” During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Hogg responded to the charge:
“I’m not a crisis actor. I’m someone who had to witness this and live through this, and I continue to be having to do that. I’m not acting on anybody’s behalf.”
With Douglas High School students observing from the balcony, Florida state legislators voted down, by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, a proposal to discuss the merits of banning AR-15 rifles in the state. And adding further insult to traumatic injury, Levi Patterson, the little league baseball team coach composed of 7 to 9-year-old 3rd graders in the town of Neosha, Missouri, has moved ahead in his planned raffle to fund his players despite growing criticism. The raffle winner will be awarded a new AR-15 rifle like the one used in the Florida tragedy.
Backlash
In the recent General Electric TV Commercial, “Ideas are Scary,” a new-born and ultimately abandoned idea appears close to death in hospital. Somehow, though, it survives infancy into adolescence. As it ventures unwashed and homeless through the town searching for basic sustenance, it finds only harsh judgments, scorn, abuse, and rejection from people everywhere it goes. Then one day, by chance it stumbles upon the GE building, where people help it inside, support, and nurture it. Sometime thereafter, it walks out upon the bright stage of life where it has grown healthy and vibrant, with its beautiful multicolored plumage raised in brilliance and pride to a hearty and resounding ovation.
Yes, new ideas and the movements they spark have usually, at least initially, appeared messy and scary because they do, indeed, “threaten what is known,” and because they truly “are the natural-born enemy to the way things are.” In terms of ideas that challenge entrenched systems of power, oppression, and privilege, forces for the maintenance of the status quo often wage figurative and literal battles to exterminate counter ideas and actions to prevent and turn back any gains progressive movements have fought so tirelessly to advance.
We see history replete with intense and often violent backlash from many factions against movements working to end, for example, the dehumanizing and oppressive institution of slavery, apartheid in South Africa, human sex trafficking worldwide, and so-called “ethnic cleansing”; to advance women’s suffrage and movements for women to control their bodies; to workers’ rights; to the right to quality education and health care for all; to civil and human rights for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, for intersex people, for people with disabilities, for young people and elders, for people of all religions and for atheists and agnostics, for people of all ethnicities and national backgrounds, for equality of opportunity for people of all socioeconomic classes; and the instances continue endlessly.
Susan Faludi, in her now-classic exposé, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, details the intense resistance to feminist ideas and movements for gender equality. By shining a powerful illuminating spotlight on this backlash, Faludi reveals and debunks the myths and stereotypes perpetrated by social institutions, from business to the media, working to restrain women in all facets of their lives.
These young activists are quickly learning the lessons taught to anyone who risks taking a stand, especially when that stand challenges an entrenched and oppressive status quo. And through it all, these courageous committed young people are exhibiting poise, intelligence, and a righteous anger that will forever change them and our nation for the better.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images