Another national action addressing the need for gun violence prevention is taking place next month. The #NationalSchoolWalkout on Friday, April 20, 2018, will join students, educators, parents, and community leaders together to take action.
At the March For Our Lives on March 24, hundreds of thousands of people flooded Washington, D.C., and satellite marches across the country to protest gun violence — a public health crisis that claims an average of 96 lives every day. As young people shared their stories of loss, grief, and survival, the nation listened.
Now it’s Congress’s turn. We’re calling on our lawmakers to listen to these advocates, support gun violence prevention research, and take informed action to protect our communities. Everyone deserves to lead a life that is healthy and free from violence.
Here are some highlights from the day’s events:
Keep Fighting
Each day that Congress fails to act, another community experiences the tragedy of gun violence. Whether gun violence is in the form of mass shootings, intimate partner violence, or overzealous and brutal policing, we cannot afford to be silent. That’s why we need you to take the energy from the March For Our Lives into the days, weeks, and months ahead.
Here are several organizations that need your support:
Another national action addressing the need for gun violence prevention is taking place next month. The #NationalSchoolWalkout on Friday, April 20, 2018, will join students, educators, parents, and community leaders together to take action.
I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Davis would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
call me captain obvious but the difference between how the parkland teens & the ferguson protesters were/are treated during protest & portrayed in media isn’t just like a matter of (for lack of a better term) post-hoc racism & antiblackness whereby white and Black people doing the same thing will be treated in different ways. the reason that the ferguson protesters were treated in ways spanning the range of dismissal, criminalisation, and police surveillance, violence & brutality wasn’t solely because individual protesters were Black per se but because their entire experience & platform was shaped by the experience of Blackness/racialisation, aka in order to defend their right to. exist freely, with the respect they deserve, safe from fear, they had to be against militarisation of the police, police violence, etc.. the reason the parkland teens can be treated with comparative respect & deference & magazine covers etc. isn’t just because “they’re white aka people will be more inclined to make positive value judgements about them” but also because “they’re white aka they exist under material circumstances that make it very easy for their platform to be subsumed into a capitalist police state & even to advance the goals of that police state.” we’re not looking at racism as attitude aka people being valuated differently for engaging in the same behaviour, but racism as structure aka people being.. constituted such that very different goals & behaviours are even available to them, & some of those behaviours are in line with the goals of a police state & some of them (by design) are not. there’s a difference between protesting to protect your lives if you’re (largely) the people whom police are designed to protect vs. if you’re (largely) the people they’re designed to harm. we need to implicate more in an analysis of racism & anti-Blackness than attitude, even “mass” or “collective” attitude. again ignore me if this is obvious but I feel from some people’s wording that they’re going the “attitude” approach
^ Shots of both the front and back of my sign today.
Education cannot happen within an environment where the students are afraid: Guns & Learning are mutually exclusive.
You see, we don’t simply teach academics in school. School is where children learn how to interact with their peers, learn who they are as people, develop the ability to make responsible decisions, learn how to set (and achieve) positive goals, develop empathy for others, and develop the skills necessary to identify, manage and communicate their own emotions in a healthy manner.
This is the entire basis of social-emotional learning. It’s a necessary aspect of school that is directly embedded in the process of creating a community that students can flourish in. These are skills tied to a child’s self esteem, self advocacy and relationship development.
A student cannot learn if they are focused on self-preservation.
A student cannot learn if they are in an unstable, unsafe or violent environment
A student cannot learn if they cannot trust the people that they are with
I can help keep my students safe from many of the harms out there: Backpack programs, clothing drives, mediation, CPS, counselors, social workers, career training programs, job fairs, mental health services…all these things can combine together in order to get a student through whatever troubles they’re experiencing. But guns? Mass shootings? Violence across the nation? I can discuss it, I can comfort, but I can’t stop it. And that’s not a situation that any of us should be in.
I don’t know where I’m going with this – Teachers are pressured not to discuss any of these things. We’re meant to always defer to the Union for official statements and always turn questions back on the students who may try to talk to us: “What do you think? How do you feel?” This past year has been an isolating experience, trying to formulate my own thoughts and deal with the ever-increasing number of tragedies. So just seeing this march today was comforting. Knowing that others are still concerned and ready to take action makes me feel less alone.
wupacing 