Suddenly, America is on the march.
Saturday’s March for Our Lives, planned for Washington and hundreds of other locations, is just the most recent sign that an extraordinary number of Americans are taking to heart the old truism that democracy should not be a spectator sport.
In numbers not seen since the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s, multitudes are venturing off the sidelines and into the game in a remarkable surge of political and social activism. Their ranks include high school students angered by gun violence, teachers fed up with low pay, and women energized by a range of grievances — notably pervasive sexual harassment and the longtime dominance of men in political power.
The array of massive women’s marches in January 2017, primarily a backlash to Donald Trump’s election as president, served as prelude to the #MeToo movement, which caught fire in October and continues to this day as emboldened women call out men who have sexually mistreated them in workplaces ranging from Hollywood to state legislatures to symphony orchestras.
The Feb. 14 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Fla., reignited the simmering national campaign to curtail gun violence. Tens of thousands of students across the U.S. walked out of their classrooms on March 14 to demand action by politicians, a prelude to this weekend’s March for Our Lives.
“I’m scared to attend my own school,” said Scarlett Scott-Buck, one of about 100 high school students from Lake Oswego, Ore., who traveled to the state capitol for a recent gun-control rally. “I’m here to be an activist for my rights to live, my friends’ rights to live.”
As the gun-control campaign was spreading nationally, public school teachers in West Virginia provided a dramatic example of how organized activism can prevail.
After a nine-day walkout, they won a 5 percent pay raise even though they lacked collective bargaining rights and had no legal right to strike.
Racial tensions also have fueled activism, including the Black Lives Matter campaign protesting the deaths of black men at the hands of police, and the take-a-knee protests by some National Football League players.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sees a common denominator in the overlapping movements.
“People see that when they come together, they have power that they don’t have when they’re alone,” she said. “Trump says ‘I alone can do it.’ But in these movements being created now, there’s a sense that with collective action, you can make possible what would have seemed impossible.”
Another common denominator: The use of social media to publicize and organize a movement with a speed and scope beyond the wildest dreams of activists in the 1960s. It took only a few days for global use of the #MeToo hashtag to pass the 1 million mark.
Parkland student Emma Gonzalez quickly amassed more than 1.2 million Twitter followers after the shooting.
And the West Virginia teachers plotted their walkout strategy over a private Facebook page that grew from an initial 100 members to more than 24,000.