On Saturday, March 24th, I had the amazing opportunity to attend an official sibling march of March for Our Lives at Winthrop University.
Our crowd may have been tiny compared to the huge turnout in D.C., but these South Carolina students, moms, dads, grandparents, and teachers were rowdy nonetheless.
It was incredibly inspiring to hear speeches from Winthrop students and local adults, several of whom had been victims of gun violence or were directly affected by it. And above all, it was humbling and moving to recognize publicly the lives that were lost on February 14th and stand in solidarity with the survivors.
We marched for the seventeen:
- Alyssa Alhadeff
- Scott Beigel
- Martin Duque Anguiano
- Nicholas Dworet
- Aaron Feis
- Jamie Guttenburg
- Chris Hixon
- Luke Hoyer
- Cara Loughran
- Gina Montalto
- Joaquin Oliver
- Alaina Petty
- Meadow Pollack
- Helena Ramsay
- Alex Schachter
- Carmen Schentrup
- Peter Wang
because their classmates have spurred us to action.
But also, we marched for the victims of the shootings at Columbine and the Pulse Nightclub, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and everyone who has been affected by a mass shooting or other forms of gun violence.
Many protests are mischaracterized as being extremist and ineffective, but my experience was very different. As I walked from campus to downtown with a hundred strangers and a couple of my closest friends, I saw a group of people with a wide array of backgrounds and beliefs, united by a common desire to pay tribute to the victims of the Parkland massacre (as well as the thousands of other children and adults who have been killed in shootings) by encouraging lawmakers and voters to take gun reform seriously.
It was not about banning guns, or taking away our Second Amendment rights. It was about the fact that the average person can look at any of the perpetrators of these crimes -people who obtained their weapons legally- and say “how the heck was he allowed to buy a gun?” And particularly in the case of Nikolas Cruz – how was he allowed to keep his weapon after being reported to local police and to the FBI on numerous occasions? Clearly, our attempts to prevent school shootings up to this point have failed. We are not content with failure.
Protests, marches, and other forms of social activism are often categorized by a single word – demonstration. “Demonstration” is defined as “the action or process of showing the existence or truth of something by giving proof or evidence.” March for Our Lives was a demonstration that a large portion of the American people – particularly students reaching voting age – are dissatisfied with the way shootings have been repeatedly brushed aside by both the government and the media after a few weeks, without real change ever being made.
Different individuals have different perspectives on what ideal gun laws would look like, but the common ground we all found at March for Our Lives was that what we have now is not sufficient. Nikolas Cruz should never have been able to purchase a weapon. The 17 people that he murdered should be alive today. And we can all agree that this should never happen again.
At Winthrop on Saturday, one of the student speakers had us listen to the song “Shine,” by Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña, two survivors of the Parkland shooting. If there’s any one thing that embodies the spirit of March for Our Lives, it’s this song. I couldn’t help but let the tears fall as the students’ powerful voices rose over our otherwise silent campus, singing:
“We’re not gonna let you win. We’re putting up a fight. You may have brought the dark, but together we will shine a light.”
This message of hope is what March for Our Lives is all about. It’s about turning unspeakable pain and loss into a catalyst for change.