March for Our Future.
“Every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
The students are marching for their lives. On March 24. Still.
The movement begun by survivors of the Parkland school massacre flashed back into the national conscious on April 20. Students at more than two thousand schools across the nation shut their books and walked out of class to mark the nineteenth anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Then again the first weekend in May. Students questioning the nation’s laissez-faire approach to gun ownership made their presence known outside the annual N.R.A. convention in Dallas, Texas. Whatever your politics, you’ve got to appreciate their grit.
The message to legislators is pointed like a №2 pencil. “Fix the gun violence in our schools or we will vote you out.”
Politicians and nervous donors have been lying low, gone quiet like neighbors disappeared into the witness protection program. A few testy conservatives, notably Laura Ingraham of the Fox News alternative universe, tried attacking the motives of the students. It went over about as well as when the president makes fun of war heroes or the physically disabled.
Mostly the governing class is hoping the whole thing will blow over. For evidence they hold in their calloused hearts the large quantity of pink pussyhats retired to the bottom of sock drawers after the Women’s March.
The modern attention span is small.
When the students first started speaking out after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, a Quinnipiac University Poll found a big jump in the number of Americans saying they want something done about guns. A couple of months later a new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll is reporting a 13 percentage point drop from then in the number of registered voters who say they care deeply about a candidate’s position on guns.
So is it disillusionment time for the kids? They say they’re not going away. Somehow I don’t see them obsessing over the latest polls, which are just another tool of the forces they’ve set themselves against.
Hunter S. Thompson, in his famous passage about the wild youth revolt of the 1960s, boiled the power of such movements down to an undeniable sense of knowing you’re on the winning side no matter how improbable that might seem at any one moment:
“And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . .”
The wave would eventually peak and break. Before it did it changed everything. In some strange ways it still is, even as the old radicals now find themselves cast in TV ads for erectile dysfunction and crematorium services.
I was only a kid when the Summer of Love came and went, along with the youth-fueled binary stars of the anti-war and civil rights movements. Years later I could still feel the pull of their riptides.
I wonder if that’s the sort of forces the Parkland students have stirred up. The instincts born of years working with language and cultural symbols tell me it just might be. My own field of advertising may not do much to uplift humanity, but it does give you a good barometer for what might be coming our way in the popular culture.
It feels like we’re in one of those strange primordial stew moments of history. Something new is emerging. No one knows for sure what shape it will take or what it will alter as it slouches onto the firm ground. Politics is a good bet. The students have already put some dents in the armor of the almighty National Rifle Association. But people forget just how far and wide the old peace movement reverberated into society.
The 60s counterculture found its energy in rejecting the establishment. Turn on, tune in, drop out. The Parkland students find theirs in taking it on, using the establishment’s own method. They plan to vote. That alone may stir things up more than anyone understands. The political class has long felt comfortable ignoring the voices of young people because they’ve always had a lousy record of showing up at the polls. Who knows what will happen if they make voting as much an obligation of youth as plugging into social media.
Predicting the future is a tricky business, but let’s do it anyway. There are just too many ways the new movement mirrors the old. The 1960s generation grew up with the absurdity of duck and cover drills, learning to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Now it’s the absurdity of school lockdown drills. The students understand that being asked to adapt their schools to a gun culture turned insanely dangerous is getting it exactly backwards. They’re calling bullshit on all of us.
Like the old anti-war movement, their issue of gun violence is a bright singularity rising in a moment of powerful crosscurrents. A lot may end up caught in the gravitational pull of its event horizon.
The students say they aren’t going away. If your work involves things like language, art, design, trends, culture, and, yes, politics, it’d be wise to take them at their word.
