February 23, 2018--Occupy Tallahassee

Some are prognosticating that the gun control "movement" led by survivors of last week's shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, will be short-lived.

The odds are that they are right. 

To sustain this effort would require children now ranging in age from 14 to 18 to devote themselves to it essentially full time while still enrolled in high school or when their time soon comes to attend college or for some, as members of the ROTC, are obligated to enter the army. If their cause were taken over by a formal organizational structure run by adults it would lose most of its visceral effectiveness. 

Half of Never Again's current appeal is not just the popularity of the issues these kids are insisting be addressed in Tallahassee and Washington but the fact that this is a children's crusade. Children who in their newly-imposed maturity and youthful wisdom are so amazingly good on TV and the Internet and thus are especially viable in our social-media age.

So, as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times move on, as they soon will, it is likely to run out of visible gas. In other words, it will no longer be as compelling and deeply moving a story as it currently is. This is inevitable.

But then again, I am reminded of another movement organized and carried out by young people which popped up unexpectedly, attracted a great following among the public and in the media, and then seemingly passed from view. 

Occupy Wall Street. 

Its outward manifestation, occupying Zuccottti Park not far from the Stock Market on Wall Street, lasted just 28 days from September 17 through November 15, 2011, but its basic message lives on. Occupy itself passed from the scene but its central message is still with us and continues to deeply affect our political discourse--the relentless economic inequality that plagues our society. The disparity in the ownership of America's wealth between the top 1% and the rest of us.

Zuccotti Park is back to normal, occupied again mainly by stock traders taking a smoking break and New York City's resilient pigeon population, but we still have lively debates about economic fairness. Bernie Sanders, for example, would not have been as viable as he turned out to be if it weren't for the issues Occupy Wall Street placed before us.

And it could be, hopefully will be, also true for Never Again. I am feeling that our discourse, such as it is, about firearms will be permanently altered. These kids and millions of others vote or will vote when they are old enough and those they have already inspired (count me among those) will keep their "common sense" issues before us and will compel candidates at the state and national levels to take their views into active consideration if they want to protect their public sinecures.

If as I sense that those as rigid and craven as Marco Rubio and Donald Trump are sounding different it may be that something new and welcome is happening thanks to those inspiring young people we have this week been getting to know.