Joy and Indigo are out of town for spring break, but I won’t follow them until Monday night, since I have an all-day training to go to on Monday. So I enjoyed a quiet morning at home alone today (Saturday), then went to the San Francisco March for Our Lives to end gun violence. When I joined the March, it extended as far as I could see in both directions. When I got to the Embarcadero I turned and walked back up Market Street a ways, and still the other marchers streamed by, no end in sight.

Seeing people’s signs was a highlight, as always. I counted three Hamilton quotes: “This is not a moment, it’s a movement,” “Tomorrow there’ll be more of us,” and “History has its eyes on you.” Several students’ signs noted the irony of their schools’ dress codes (especially for girls) being more restrictive than gun laws. There were many pleas to give teachers more resources to do their jobs instead of guns. I liked this one from a girl about Indigo’s age.

One man walked by with the sign “Arming teachers is like arming priests and rabbis.” I wasn’t sure what that meant (still am not) but I came up alongside him to tell him that I’m a minister, and although I know the chances are almost nil that anything would happen during a service, since the massacre in Sutherland Springs, I always keep my cell phone in the pulpit when I preach: charged, and on, and right where I can get at it. He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to think about that kind of thing.” Yeah.

As is so often the case, the media exaggerates the role of white students and implies that few Parkland students or organizers are African-American, just as, when African-American teenagers have organized responses to violence in their communities they’ve been ignored (“no one addresses ‘black-on-black crime'”), and when they have peacefully protested violence by police, they’ve too often been portrayed not as promising leaders, but as thugs.

Not that the Parkland students have been consistently lionized; the NRA seems to be accusing them of loving the attention, and the media responses are mixed. Still, the dominant response has been admiring, supportive, and grateful–as it should be. Now if we could respond to the young leaders of Black Lives Matter and other, people-of-color-led anti-violence activism the same way . . .

For my part, since I’m so frustrated by the deceptive and self-deceptive narrative about how “good guys with guns” (whether teachers, armed guards, or individuals in their homes) are a viable solution to gun violence, the connection between the deaths of Stephon Clark and others at the hands of police, and that of my aunt at the hands of her (professional, middle-class, white) husband, is evident. Both are cases of those widely perceived as “the right people,” the “good guys,” becoming a deadly risk to those they are supposed to protect. That comes about when a “good guy” is laden with fear, uncontrolled anger, and an attitude of entitlement, but these are far more likely to be fatal when combined with guns.

So one side of my sandwich board memorialized my aunt,

and the other evoked, along with her name, the names of some African-American victims of the “good guy” myth.

Rest in peace, because we will not stop fighting the greed and injustice that killed you.

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