Image Credit: AnubisAbyss, CC BY-SA 2.0

Last weekend, I joined the students in Boston to March For Our Lives and protest the complete inaction of Congress to do anything about school shootings and assault rifles. Let’s leave the obvious debate aside for a minute (see “Can We Be Rational About Guns?“) and consider the March itself.

The students were impressive: articulate, responsible, serious, non-violent, and inclusive. They were making their feelings known and demonstrating what democracy looks like. To see a new generation taking their civic responsibility to speak up seriously is a welcome sight. A democracy functions best when its citizens are engaged: paying attention to the issues, debating objectives and alternatives, and showing up to vote. To me, Saturday’s marches were tremendously uplifting signs of engagement.

My mood was dampened, however, by the nasty, petty responses from what I hope is a minority of people. Since most of the nastiness is completely irrelevant to the situation, I shouldn’t really care, but since the irrelevance seems to go unnoticed as it spreads like wildfire on social media, I care a lot:

• Discrediting student speakers with derogatory names and descriptions – sheer nastiness.
• Commenting negatively about their clothing – more petty nastiness.
• Manipulating videos to show one of these students doing something she never did – horrid.
• Suggesting they should learn CPR instead of marching – ridiculous efforts to put the genie back in the bottle.
• Blaming them for getting shot because they weren’t nice enough to bullies – give me a break.
• Questioning and/or belittling their motivation – their motivation isn’t the problem.
• Bringing up Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – totally irrelevant.
• Raising the issue of abortions – another irrelvance and false equivalence.
• Suggesting they are puppets incapable of doing what they are doing – just listen to them!

We need clarity so badly in this country! We must separate objectives from alternatives so we can agree on the former before throwing rocks over the latter. We need to separate fact from slander, observable behavior from assumptions, and logical process from emotional rant. Anyone who can’t give these students some credit needs to work on those distinctions.