--Sign at the March for Our Lives
By David K. Shipler
Every big
march has a personality and a mood. The 1963 March on Washington, where Martin
Luther King Jr. declared, “I have a dream,” was the friendliest large crowd I’ve
ever been in, with warmth and smiles and easy conversation among strangers—except
during Dr. King’s speech, when the hundreds of thousands on the Mall fell quiet
under the cadence of his hopeful appeal to the conscience of America.
The November 1969 demonstration by the New Mobilization Committee against the Vietnam War, mostly grim and peaceful, disintegrated late in the
day as militants in the Weather Underground threw rocks, bottles, and paint at
the ground-floor windows of the Justice Department, and then at police officers
who replied with volleys of teargas and nightsticks.
The 1995 Million
Man March, billed as a demonstration of atonement and renewal by African-American
men, was conducted in an air of firm, morality-driven conviction and
contemplation as speaker after speaker confessed, apologized, pledged, cajoled,
preached, and promised.
The 2017
Women’s March, the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, displayed all the difficult
emotions of that moment for those who decried his election: defiance,
bitterness, resentment, resolve—but with a tincture of dry wit represented in
the hand-made pink pussy hats worn to mock Trump’s boastful claim to a pussy-grabbing
habit.
Today, the
March for Our Lives in Washington was different. There was some wit in the signs, to
be sure (“Trump Loves NRA Because It’s Easy to Spell”), and some laughter from
the cramped crowds of teenagers and younger kids, of teachers and parents and
other adults from the graying and limping to the lithe. We weren’t all solemn
all the time. Just most of the time. It didn’t take a big push to get us to the
edge of angry tears.
