After various 17-minute walkouts at many individual schools, hundreds of students gathered for a rally at Riverside Park in Ypsilanti, Mich. on March 14, 2018. Voices could be both heard and seen in the cold, 35-degree air, some people wrapped in blankets as they struggled to stay warm.
“My toes are cold, but it warms my heart to see everyone here,” said Hasna Ghalib, one of the speakers, describing a feeling clearly shared by the many whoops and hollers of agreement that followed. “This cold has frozen the living daylights out of my vocal chords, but I’m still up here, and you’re all still in front of me.”
The shivering students had arrived from all over Washtenaw County, brandishing signs that read slogans such as “books NOT bullets” and “Silence Our Guns, Not Our Voices.”
Along with the feeling of frozen toes, these students shared another thing in common: an anger for the neglect our government has shown toward gun violence. With this feeling as their fuel, the students came to Ypsilanti to show their disgust at the lack of legislation, particularly following the school shooting in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. on Feb. 14.
Gathering 15 minutes before the speakers were set to begin, protesters shared in sign-making and hot chocolate-drinking. At 11 a.m., Max McNally, a senior at Lincoln High School, got behind a microphone positioned in the gazebo resting on Huron River.
“Hey, Washtenaw County!” McNally shouted into the microphone as the crowd shifted to gather around him, preparing for the upcoming speakers. McNally began with a short opening in which he mentioned that the people there protesting were sending “a figurative middle finger at the NRA.”
Later, he compared guns to cigarettes, saying that health education teaches students not to use and abuse various substances, and then asking why it is not the same with guns.
“None of that matters — whether I’m smoking, whether I’m addicted to this or that — if I’m coming to school and someone pulls out an AR-15 and mows me and my friends down,” McNally passionately said. “It doesn’t matter if I smoke when I get home, I’m dead.”
A topic that came up a couple of times was that while everyone was rallying for the same general idea of gun control laws, they were not agreeing on the same solutions, which was okay. Clara Nunez-Regueiro, one of the first speakers, addressed this in her speech.
“If there is one thing that we can unequivocally agree on, [it] is that we have to demand safety in our schools, because we are sick of watching child after innocent child die in the classroom,” Nunez-Regueiro said, which many agreed with, apparent by the following eruption of the crowd.
When Saima Harrison, sophomore at Pioneer High School, later spoke, she used a personal anecdote to stress her opinion on gun control.
“When I was in seventh grade, school was my safe place,” Harrison said. “I was depressed, I was suicidal, and I could go to school and I was away from the world. Recently, there was a kid who went to school and shot himself in the bathroom. He was in seventh grade.” She feels that this poor student should not have had the chance to get a gun and kill himself with it.
“Sandy Hook should have been the last school shooting,” Harrison went on to say. “Columbine should have been the last school shooting. There are so many school shootings that should’ve been the last. Today, we are here saying that the Parkland school shooting is the last school shooting! It’s not going to happen here!”
Aija Turner echoed Harrison later in the rally, during her speech. She asked the crowd a seemingly simple question, “When is the time to talk about it?” Each time, she received “right now!” as an answer.
“When is the time to talk about it?” Turner asked. “After the Columbine shooting, when 15 lives were taken? When is the time to talk about it? After Sandy Hook, when 28 innocent teachers and children died? When is the time to talk about it? After the mass shooting in Orlando, when it was Latinx night at a gay nightclub, when black and brown people, a part of the LGBTQ community were targeted, and 49 of them died? Again, I ask, when is the time to talk about it? We send our thoughts and prayers, we make our social media posts, and then we mourn. Everyone turns their heads and they say that they don’t want to talk about it right now, that now is not the time to make it political. So once again, I ask, when is the time to talk about it?”
The crowd was very vocal in their agreement with the things Turner was saying. She spoke not only of the victims, but also the ways in which the shooters are treated.
“If they identify as Muslim, we label them as terrorists — which is inherently Islamophobic,” Turner shouted, getting clearly more agitated as her speech went on. “If it was a black man who commited the crime, they’re labeled as thugs — that is anti-black. But when it’s a white man who does the shooting, he’s labeled as a lone wolf; he is given the benefit of the doubt; he is deemed as mentally ill. We ignore that by doing this we further stigmatize and generalize actual people who suffer from mental illnesses. By doing this we validate the fear that people have for black and brown men and people of color, and that we validate people’s Islamophobia; we perpetuate it.”
She ended her speech by looking towards the future, as many others had done before her.
“Today we say no more,” she said. “Today we carry on the revolution. Today we have no doubt, and we march because we call BS! But we can’t let the revolution stop here. It extends beyond social media; it extends beyond protest; it extends beyond being an ally. It’s about solidarity. And with solidarity comes sacrifice. And with sacrifice comes action.”
Turner’s closing statement paralleled something that Ghalid had said: “We’re everything. We’re everything! You are the future, you are power, you are voice. We’re everything! I refuse to die at the hands of a gun, and the day it silences me will be the day that this has all been for a loss. We call…” The crowd howled in response with
“BS!”
Credits:
Photos by Grace Jensen