March For Our Lives 

America is angry.  Politically charged youth, anti-establishment sentiment, shouting down of mainstream politicians, over-the-top pronouncements and drama, and mainstream media hanging on for the ride unable to discern or report anything of informational substance.  The people were speaking and there were no rules of engagement. The press is used to running the show, or at least recognizing the program cover, whether its on Air Force One directly with the President, or in a press conference with controlled questions and delicate and nuanced answers.  This was not that.

With echoes of 1968, on March 24, 2018, hundreds of thousands of young people (and a few old…) descended on major cities, and some smaller cities, with a battle cry of emotion, hurt, pain, and anger, directed at just about every institution and current politician.   Directed also at many concepts and fundamental beliefs that I hold dear. Directed at constitutional constructs that appeared as solid as the reputations and ideas of the founding fathers for over two hundred years. The young people yesterday were not concerned at all about how things have been or how they have been done.  They want something new. While I do not agree with many of the solutions presented at the March, yesterday was not a policy debate. Yesterday was a day of mourning for hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans.

When I was a young man in high school, in the early 1980s, I was also very politically active.  We had “real” problems, as I perceived them: anti-communism, proxy wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, apartheid in South Africa, and the very recent nation-state changes in former European colonies in Africa.  Turmoil, discontent, uncertainty, and real danger at every turn. We made it through, and America learned a number of lessons in that period. America also changed a great deal after that period. People on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, had to find a way to declare what America meant to itself and the world.  Were we more than an economic or military power to be feared or courted? Were we an exceptional nation that stood for fundamental values that every person should hold dear? Interesting times. The cold war ended in 1989. Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994. The proxy wars in Central America waned and democratic elections were held.  None of that occurred without struggle, and policy debate, and policy action.

America has always allowed itself and its citizens to re-imagine themselves and their country.  The moving industry, from United Van Lines to Mayflower to U-Haul, are evidence of that desire for something, someplace, new, where folks can start over and get a fresh start.  That’s how we began as a nation, and that’s who we are as a people. Like yesterday’s March For Our Lives, new imaginings rarely begin in silent contemplation of the nature of things and a detailed and articulate effort at designing the new structures and norms.  Our constitution was written after the anger of the Boston Tea Party, not before. Change is messy. Anger and mourning is needed before policy change can be discussed. Yesterday was very uniquely American, and that makes me very proud.