On Saturday, March 24th, people all across the country and the world marched in The March For Our Lives, set up by the survivors of the Parkland, FL school shooting that occurred February 14th. Although I wasn’t able to march in a big city, I was still able to march in Gainesville, Florida, and for a small town, there was a surprisingly big turnout: around three thousand people. After participating in the march and then reading later about how many people attended, I realized what a historic and monumental event this march had been. Just in DC alone, an estimated 800,000 marched, and this does not count the over 800 other marches that were recorded to have occurred throughout the country. This 800,000 statistic in Washington surpassed the 500,000 at the 2017 women’s march, and even exceeded the 1969 Demonstration against the Vietnam War. It is with this knowledge that hearing from adults that children and teens can’t make a difference makes me so irritated.
I’d first like to remind these adults that almost every historical movement that has enacted a major change in this country was orchestrated and organized by young people. The Trump election, as bad of an outcome that I and many others believe it is, has actually fired up many in our generation and driven us to take major interest in our political system and government. We’re paying more attention, we’re being active, we’re trying to discern political propaganda from facts, trying to decipher who is going to govern for us or for themselves.
Politicians who mock the teens protesting them should also keep in mind that many of those teens are already eighteen, or will become eighteen in a short amount of time, and they should be aware that they will be present at the voting booths.
Something I’ve also heard in opposition to this movement is the argument that young people’s brains haven’t developed yet and so aren’t capable of making responsible decisions. I’ll agree that while a thirteen-year-old probably shouldn’t be voting yet, it doesn’t mean that they can’t tell right from wrong, and their morals are actually probably purer than many adults around. And the sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen-year-olds that they criticize are the ones they’re letting drive and go to war. If these ages are allowed for those types of services and activities, then clearly there is hypocrisy going on, when they are supposedly too immature to have a valid reason to protest.
After watching the powerful speeches made by the survivors of the Parkland shooting and the organizers of the march, I feel confident that these people will be our future politicians, ones who care about morals and lives over greed and power.
