What gets lost when we only critique the Parkland students’ demands
The hot takes are popping off about last Saturday’s March for Our Lives. Some say the kids were wasting their time, others say (correctly) that some of their demands are harmful and reactionary, and yet others say they’ve been co-opted by the Democratic Party.
I’m not interested in settling the score because, what do I know? I’m not involved in organizing for gun control policy or healing communities traumatized by gun violence. But I do want to lift up something that’s hard to miss when it’s teenagers leading the charge.
Getting involved in politics — I don’t mean becoming a politician; I mean demanding and fighting for a different society — is a process, both inside and in relationship with others.
This society stomps out our desire for change, or at best channels it into individual pursuits: entrepreneurship, investing, resume building, “finding yourself,” a side hustle, and so on. Trying to head in the opposite direction, towards being in relationship with others beyond the workplace or bedroom, is a never-ending process. We grow as we learn the skills required for radical democracy, to set boundaries for ourselves and our communities, make demands, listen, and communicate our needs to others.
Critiquing the Parkland students’ demands and strategic choices is important, but we should remember that each and every one of those students and even everyone that rallied grew a little bit on Saturday.
There’s a story in Buddhist lore that nails this truth. It involves the concept of a bodhisattva, someone who declines enlightenment to help everyone else becoming enlightened first. Avalokiteshvara is a mythical being who took a vow to save all sentient beings, telling another enlightened figure, Amitabha, that if he ever got discouraged “may my body be shattered into a thousand pieces.”
But after he tried for a billion years, Avalokiteshvera realized that there were more beings to save —he felt like “the work” would never end. When he gave up his vow his head cracked into a thousand pieces. Seeing this, Amitabha, a formidable spiritual figure himself, felt compassion for Avalokiteshvera and blessed the weary bodhisattva. According to the myth, the thousand pieces turned into a thousand arms, a thousand eyes, and eleven heads, reviving Avalokiteshvara and transforming him into a much more imposing figure.
We could say Avalokiteshvara represents that part of us that, for whatever reason, is disappointed by the state of our neighborhood, city, or society, and expects much more. That part of us that gets overrun by our near constant feeling of losing, of war and oppression never ending, of the Earth being trampled, of authentic community slipping through our fingers.
When we surrender the perfection we seek— utopia — that’s when that part of us, our compassion, becomes fuel that can never be depleted. When we’re not expecting perfection, we begin to see every attempt at opening rather than closing down, no matter how naive or awkward, as a seed, as potential. It’s the right that sees openness as something to crush.
No march, no rally, no strike, no action will ever be inclusive or radical or woke enough. The point is to try, inevitably fail, learn, and continue to open rather than close down.
Seeing teenagers go through this process is a reminder that, even though solidarity is the method of changing society, politics includes change at the level of the individual, which we often overlook. In our obsession with community, society, socialized this and that, “the system,” we cede to the right what’s happening inside. It’s the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that “lean in” and “push against their edge,” and then get up off the mat, learn from it, and write bestsellers. It’s the GOP senator that makes decisions based on his “relationship with God.”
But it was Afro-Trinidadian historian and socialist C.L.R. James who wrote, “The process of revolution is essentially a process of people finding themselves.”
