Ugly Responses to Parkland Advocates Exposes How Far Discourse Has Fallen
It has been bewildering to watch as adults, professionals and amateurs from the safety of computer screens alike, brutally attack teenagers who survived a school shooting. On February 14, 2018, 17 people, some as young as 14 years-old, were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Immediately after uttering the usual platitudes about not “politicizing” a tragedy, the forces opposed to increased gun control launched full-scale into the character assassination of Parkland students Emma González and David Hogg — de facto leaders of the student advocates — and other like-minded teenagers in schools across the country.
It is not the opposition itself, however, that is so disheartening. The Second Amendment, in my opinion, is important and defensible. And though I disagree with many Second Amendment advocates regarding the level and type of gun control measures which are acceptable, I can understand their concern even while we disagree on less-abstract policy points.
What is disheartening is not the opposition, but the disgraceful method that some Second Amendment advocates have employed to ravage survivors of a fatal school shooting. NRA board member Ted Nugent recently called these students “soulless,” “liars,” and “poor, mushy-brained children.” RedState posted a widely-disseminated news story reporting that Hogg was not a Marjory Stoneman Douglas Student at all, but a crisis actor. The report was quickly debunked and RedState was forced to recant, but the false narrative persists. A doctored image of González ripping the Constitution circulated widely on social media before being debunked. Minnesota Rep. Mary Franson compared student marchers to Hitler Youth and, following backlash, unconvincingly explained that she didn’t intend the comparison despite it being part of a string of social media posts criticizing Hogg and the March For Our Lives. Leslie Gibson, a then-Republican candidate for the state House in Maine tweeted, referring to González, “There is nothing about that skin head lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing that she has to say unless you’re a frothing at the mouth moonbat.” Fox News Host Laura Ingraham personally attacked Hogg on Twitter for “whining” about not being accepted to four colleges. Ingraham’s statement was especially transparent character assassination as it had absolutely nothing to do with his advocacy, the Second Amendment, or gun control. She just wanted to spread something negative about a 17 year-old boy who she saw as a political opponent and a ratings boon. It is remarkable that when faced with such pettiness from a supposed adult, the actual teenager in this equation did not react with pettiness. Instead, Hogg reacted like a calm and shrewd advocate, decrying her bullying and reaching out to her advertisers. At least 12 advertisers have now pulled ads from Ingraham’s program, and rightly so.
Unsurprisingly, the far right media has done their part to help win the race to the bottom. Breitbart News compared Hogg to Adolf Hitler. This sentiment was shared by InfoWars’ Alex Jones who described the March For Our Lives as a “Hitler Youth invasion” and Hogg as “the chief propagandist in the left-wing fascist ‘Hitler Youth army.’” Although, it’s hard to expect much more from the man who notoriously said in September 2014 that the Sandy Hook massacre, and the murders of 20 elementary school children, was a liberal hoax. Unfortunately, this type of sickening “discourse” was dragged shrieking into the mainstream by then-candidate Donald Trump, who appeared on Jones’ show and praised his “amazing reputation” just months after he aired his Sandy Hook conspiracy theory and then proceeded to appoint Breitbart’s Steve Bannon as his initial White House Chief Strategist. Is it any surprise that many of these media outlets and public figures bent over backwards to humanize a torch-toting racist mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville even as they now brutally smear teen school-shooting survivors advocating for gun control?
No wonder public displays of savagery are in such abundance on social media while common decency withers. No wonder our common political dialogue is so often laden with contempt and mockery when these are our public examples.
Decent people need not adopt every word uttered by Hogg, González, other Parkland students, or engaged students across the country, nor do I believe all opinions carried on the shoulders of tragedy are implicitly correct or incorrect. Even these ideas should be subject to honest examination and evaluation in the search for responsible policy. However, it is indecent to participate or indulge in hateful, mocking, dishonest smear campaigns of earnest teenagers who survived a massacre or fear experiencing one.
Do not call them babies, brats, whiners, or twerps. Do not disseminate debunked and offensive statements about them being crisis actors or Nazis. Don’t engage in meaningless “whataboutism” that throws out every other possible problem in the world dismissively as a way to prevent all dialogue about any one real problem. Do not call them liars or belittle them. Do not patronize political pundits who would lob petty insults at anyone, let alone a teenager speaking out because he lived through a school shooting. Do not circulate memes implying that these kids have nothing to complain about considering the young people who fought in World War II. These are not soldiers in a war, drafted or otherwise, they are kids whose friends and teachers were shot and killed on a regular school day just over a month ago. These are kids who hid in closets and behind classroom doors to the sound of gunshots because someone was trying to kill them. It happened at school, not on the battlefield.
It is time America remembered that one need not agree with another person’s political position to respect his or her experience. If so many can’t even manage to treat teenage survivors of a school shooting with kindness and respect, what hope do we have displaying decency with anyone else across an ideological divide?
If you support stricter gun control measures, speak out. Conversely, if you are wary of the objectives of gun control advocates, by all means make your views and reasons known. But doing so while humorlessly mocking or personally criticizing anyone, let alone a teenage boy or girl who lived through violent tragedy, will not do you or your cause any favors. Through respectful, honest dialogue we may even find common ground. But there is no common ground in being petty, childish, and cruel toward a group of kids who survived a massacre.
Our public discourse has a lot to learn from teenagers who, on the heels of crisis, have conducted themselves with a great deal more maturity and dignity than so many of their adult critics.
