Woodstock Rocked the March for Our Lives

The crowd gathers around the Gazebo at the March for Life rally on Woodstock Square.  Photo by Missy Funk.

While 800,000 or more flooded Washington to in a movement built and carefully shepherded by those remarkable survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass murder in Parkland, Florida millions more lent their voices and shoe leather over 800 events across the United States and around the world.  One of them was held on the Square in Woodstock, Illinois where hundreds braved a raw and blustery day.  And believe me, they frightened the gun protecting local politicos every bit as much as those Parkland kids struck terror in Congress, the White House, and in the plush boardroom of the National Rifle Association.

Survivor/organizer Emma Gonzalez in the most power silence ever at the  Washington DC March for Our  Lives

When I got home from Woodstock I found social media abuzz with clips of remarkable speech after remarkable speech made in the shadow of the Capitol dome.  I watched and wept shamelessly when Emma Gonzalez stood for “the most powerful six minutes and twenty seconds of silence in history.  I was inspired when young people from and affluent community made sure that children of color, who often face even more pervasive gun violence only to find their lives and deaths undervalued and underreported, were brought in to speak for themselves.  And I was roused to an even firmer commitment to action and a determination to #NeverAgain allow discouragement reinforce the bloody status quo.

The Old Man uniformed up.

In its own way Woodstock was just as affecting.  Although a group of Democratic women helped pull together the McHenry County event, they were always respectful of the focus and message of the March for Our Lives as envisioned by the Parkland students and to keep the voice of youth front and center. 

McHenry Count Democrats Vice Chair Kristina Zahorik was the skillful host of the one hour long pre-march rally.  She introduced a parade of young people who brilliantly spoke for themselves or read from the heartbreaking accounts of the Florida shooting and its aftermath. The program also included Kathleen Larimer, the Crystal Lake mom whose sailor son John was shot to death sheltering his girlfriend in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre and Kayla Borton who was a freshman at Northern Illinois University who survived another mass shooting ten years to the day before Parkland.

Kathleen Larimer, mother of a victim of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre, singer Cassandra Vos-Demann, and event host Kristina Zahorik.  Photo by Beth Hoover.

Zahorik closed the speaking part of the program with clarion call to hold enabling politicians responsible.  She was not shy about naming name or laying the blame at the feet of local Republicans in thrall to the NRA and called for the miscreants to be voted out of office.   But this was not mere partisanship, but a call for a necessary political revolution to put lives ahead of guns and fetishes.

The program concluded with the powerful voice of Cassandra Vohs-Demann leading the crowd in singing not some old protest song or other hoary chestnut but 4 Non Blondes brilliant What’s Up.  Its lyrics and catchy hook were perfect:

25 years of my life and still

I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope

For a destination

I realized quickly when I knew I should

That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man

For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes

When I’m lying in bed

Just to get it all out

What's in my head’

And I, I am feeling... a little peculiar.

I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope

For a destination

I realized quickly when I knew I should

That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man

For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes

When I’m lying in bed

Just to get it all out

What’s in my head

And I, I am feeling... a little peculiar.

And so I wake in the morning

And I step outside

And I take a deep breath and I get real high

And I scream from the top of my lungs

What’s going on?

And I say:
Hey yeah yeaaah!
Hey yeah yeah.
I said hey
What’s going on?

And I say:
Hey yeah yeaaah!
Hey yeah yeah.
I said hey
What’s going on?

Uhh, uh, uhuhuh uhuhuh
Uhh, uh, uhuhuh uhuhuh

And I try
Oh my God do I try
I try all the time
In this institution.

And I pray

Oh my God do I pray

I pray every single day

For a revolution.

 

Photo  by Carol Alfus.

The March set off to lap the perimeter of the Square with high energy and enthusiasm despite a biting cold wind.  I am told that Woodstock Police estimated that over 1000 people, young and old, took part.  There were enough of us to completely surround the Square.  Last March a counter protest to an anti-immigrant and pro-Trump rally did the same and it had a verified participation of over 2000, gauged by the number of Hate Has No Home in Woodstock buttons were passed out.

Most folks did a couple of laps of the Square before the cold sent them scurrying for hot chocolate, a stiff drink, or a fireplace.  But if you listen carefully you can still hear the message.  I know the NRA and their bought and paid for politicians can.

Revisiting The Gunning of America and How to Change It

An already dated map of mass shooting since Sandy Hook.

Note:  The following post first appeared on December 15, 2012, the day after the unspeakable tragedy of the mass murder and suicide at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  Since then, there have been at least 1,044 mass shootings in America, with shooters killing at least 1,327 people and wounding 3,784 more.  They are coming so fast and furious these days we are numb.  Since then I have written posts and poems after several massacres, the most recent after the shootings in San Bernardino.  Some of those posts were little more than sputtering outrage.  More recently there is a note of near helpless despair.   Was I saner or simply more gullible when I wrote this post? 

This flintlock long rifle was made in Lancaster,  Pennsylvania in the 1780's and is the oldest and most honored Murfin family relic.  Every December it shares its wall space with festive holiday decorations.

A darkness has descended on the season of the Festivals of Life.  The laughing children just yesterday awaiting Santa are gone, their families in anguish, their school mates traumatized, a whole nation stunned once again by senseless, but no longer surprising, gun violence.

On top of his post is a picture of an ancient Pennsylvania flintlock long rifle passed down in the Murfin family for more than two hundred years.  It is the only heirloom of family history I have older than my father’s generation.  It was, by clear physical evidence, a much used working rifle which put food on the table and likely was carried or used in the wars between the settlers like my ancestors and the Native Americans that caused the frontier along the Ohio River and the old Northwest Territory to bleed for decades.  That gun is part of the American story.

Some think that the romance of that gun, the six shooters in the hands of impossibly square jawed handsome men in white hats, the spitting Tommy Guns of gangsters and G-Men, the cannon sized pistols of Dirty Harry and fantasy vigilantes are the problem.  That our national obsession with them has turned us into a nation of gun worshipers who if we don’t kill personally indulge in rich fantasies in which we and our arms are heroes.

Maybe.  But it is deeper than that.

I responded to the inevitable pro-gun Facebook claim that armed staff members might have prevented the killings from happening.  This is part of what I wrote:

There are no easy answers. We dug a huge, murderous hole for ourselves in this country unmatched anywhere in the world. As many guns as people, probably more. More licensed dealers than grocery stores. More annual deaths than any on-going war. A greater percent of our population in prison for much longer times than any place save China and Iran. A pervasive culture of fear and suspicion. Mental health care rationed as if were treasure. Macho posturing passing for manhood. And none of it has done any good. We are no safer. Your answer—more guns, more prisons, more fear? We have to make deep changes, all of us, me and you. Talk to each other instead of demonizing each other. Put our children ahead of our pride. Give a little something up. Give a little more back…we all have to give something. Pride first.

I think the original poster was wrong as he can be about guns.  He undoubtedly thinks I’m a gun grabbing communist.  It would be easy to stare at each other over the abyss filled with the bodies of children and forgetting them, hate each other for who we think the other is.

But I know Bill is a guy who sits on a sofa every morning with his five year old granddaughter, sharing old movies, cookies and funny stories.  He loves his grandchildren as much as I love mine.  He means no child harm.  And he genuinely grieves for the loss. 

The photo I posted of my five year old self--the blond in the middle--with my father and twin brother Tim on Christmas morning.

Hours after this exchange, I posted, “It has been suggested in honor of the children lost today, we post a photo of ourselves at 5 years of age as our profile picture. I posted this one recently used for the holiday season. It is a reminder of our own once tender selves—and all of the lost years the children slain today have been denied.”  Moments later Bill posted a fuzzy photo of a grinning blond boy proudly showing off two nice fish.  He understood.  Across the chasm of our differences our five year old selves joined with the five year olds snuffed out in Connecticut.

It’s going to take deep, deep work and decades of pain and sorrow to turn around the culture of death, violence, revenge, and fear that have turned our nation into a daily carnal house.

Five hours ago I had paragraphs of angry words composed in my head, waiting for my fingers to caress the keyboard.  I was filled with righteousness and a spirit of wrathful vengeance.  I wanted to spit defiance at every gun nut, every well paid slick lobbyist, every craven politician that enabled the carnage.  

The kind of hysterical propaganda churned out by pro-gun groups.

At the same time behind locked doors terrified men cradling their darlings leapt over the bodies of the children in a panicked response that the killings would cause the gun grabbers to knock down their doors in the dead of night.  They were filled with murderous rage, too.  Against the shooter, but also against their neighbors who feel differently about guns.

Look, I’m not making a case for any namby-pamby moral equivalence.  None of that one-hand-on-the-other-hand bullshit or the pseudo impartial “balance” of the professional press.  I have a firm grasp on the morality of this cultural obsession and I know there are real villains in the plush suites of the NRA, Fox News, and the arms lobby

But unless the ordinary folks on both sides of this divide can find a way to recognize each other’s simple humanity and reach out to find whatever shaky common ground we have we are sliding into the very civil war which I think frankly the worst of the other side not-so-secretly yearn for.

I have no magic solutions, but maybe a few what ifs that will require us all to give up a little something.

What if we acknowledged that there are just too damn many guns in this country and that any idgit, criminal or psycho can get a hold of them without breaking a sweat?

What if we found ways to reduce the numbers of those guns out there, starting with the essentially military weapons designed not for hunting, target practice, or self-protection but for the efficient killing of other human beings?

What if every dick in America could not get a Federal Gun Dealer’s License on the strength of a form requiring far less information than securing a car loan and what if they couldn’t deal guns out of car trunks, kitchen tables, and gun show to any piss-a-hole-in-the-snow warm body that shows up with cash?

What if we really checked the background of all buyers not just for criminal histories, but for demonstrable mental illness, those with active orders of protection against them, those who are known to belong to hate groups, militias, and insurrectionists?

Sounds like the usual “Liberal anti-gun agenda?”  Notice it does not call for confiscation of all weapons, allows for hunting and sports shooting, and even for the possession of reasonable self-defense weapons by responsible owners. 

It ain't going to happen, folks, and things like this promoted by gun opponents feeds the paranoia on the other side, hardens lines of opposition , and multiply the chances of an actual civil war.

And you gun control folks—give up the illusion that in this country hand guns or all guns can be simply made illegal or that the Second Amendment having been abused, needs to be rescinded.  It ain’t gonna happen and you need to acknowledge that.

The folks out in my home country of Wyoming and broad swaths of the West and South and plenty of pockets of hunters and shooters in the rest of the country are not just kidding with their “you’ll get my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands” rhetoric.  A lot of them are ready and some are eager to take to the hills and wild places and make like Afghan mujaheddin waging a guerrilla war.  The US Army literally does not have enough troops to win that war.

And remember that the majority of guns in this country are in the hands of frightened middle class folks in their suburban villages and safe urban enclaves.  No American politician, whatever black helicopter fantasies gun lover may harbor, is going to authorize police to kick down their doors in the middle of the night to size their guns.

Even if you could outlaw all gun sales, an efficient black market would be in place the next day. Our coastlines are long, our borders porous, and our smugglers experienced and creative.  Guns would continue to pour in to the country, probably in greater numbers than ever just as prohibition and drug laws increased the appetite and usage of the banned substance.

At best we will get a slow attrition of guns on the streets which will take decades to come down to reasonable levels.

In the mean time we have to work to make mental health services easily and widely available on the same footing as any other health care.  And since we do such a damn bad job at providing even general health care, we are going to have to have a little dose of “socialized medicine.”  Don’t like that? Sit down, shut up, and deal with it.

We have to stop sending every 17 year old with a joint to prison.  Our draconian drug laws enable the street wars to control a thriving black market, send huge numbers—mostly Black and Latin—into the universities of crime, and stigmatizes them for life so that they become essentially locked out of legitimate employment.  The highly lucrative prison-industrial complex needs to be smashed.

Even harder will be bridging the oceans of fear and suspicion that divide us by race, religion, language, politics, gender, sexual orientation, and class.  We’ve grown too comfortable in our cocoons and too attached to a casual bigotry we pretend does not exist.  We need to get to know each other not because it’s a nice thing to do but because our survival as a society ultimately depends on it.

This last is the deepest soul work we must all do for ourselves and together.  Pride, ego, and decades of carefully nursed grudges and resentments will all have to be put aside.  It will be painful.  It will be wrenching.

But not more so than the next massacre of the innocents.