It was a beautiful, powerful day. Saturday, March 24, when a new generation of kids became people, became people with a message, and a very uncomfortable message it is—“So what is up with you old bastards, and why are you so feeble, incompetent and wretched?”
It’s an uncomfortable question, because everybody knows there is no good answer, that the answer is, at its heart, corrupt. Corrupt beyond redemption. Corrupt beyond salvage. They look at our Congress, at our politics, and they see an endless pie fight that is very often beyond belief with cruel, bizarre idiocy. They look at this absurd mess—subsidies for Big Oil? death to Health Care? fetish love for ammosexuals and their insane guns?—and ask, “What the hell are you people on? How can this bullshit be so common, so prevalent, so acceptable?” And the answer, of course, is money. Follow the fuckin’ money.
It was a day for The Kids to stand up, grab the mic, and say something. This they did, with style, intelligence and moxie. The students have been released, and not for the first time. It was students who bravely went into the redneck South in the early ’60s on behalf of black voting rights, and some of them got killed for doing so. It was students who marched against the insanity of Vietnam and yanked this country’s head out of its ass. Those sure weren’t our fucking parents who were out there getting clubbed and gassed. It was us. And, now, the wheel turns. The students, once again, are ready to hit the streets. And then, hopefully—they’re ready to vote.
Here are four of the many brilliant, clever, funny, poignant signs from March 24: “When I said I’d rather die than go to math class, that was hyperbole, assholes.” “Honey, your gun doesn’t make your dick look bigger. It makes you look like a bigger dick.” “Next massacre will be the GOP in midterm elections.” “What if these kids are the answer to your thoughts and prayers?”
Amen, indeed, right on, and let’s hope.
55 years ago, our boy Bobby D sang.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it’s ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a
changin’.