How Spontaneous Was "March for Our Lives"? (Average Age: 49)
I was a major event organizer as a high school student.
From June 1958 until April 1959, I organized the annual one-day Southern California conference of the California Scholarship Federation, California's alternative to the National Honor Society. This conference hosted over 1,000 high school students. I had the help of two other students who donated time. It was not an easy project. But I did not have to get permits to march in the streets. I did not have to organize transportation. I did not have to publicize the event. Publicity was handled by the local high school chapters of the CSF.
This is why I am greatly impressed by the March for Our Lives on March 24.
A CURIOUS EVENT
Wikipedia reports:
March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration in support of tighter gun control that took place on March 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C., with over 800 sibling events throughout the United States and around the world. Student organizers from Never Again MSD planned the march in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Everytown for Gun Safety.
That's not all.
March for Our Lives was among the biggest youth-led protests since the Vietnam War era. Estimates of participation at the main event in Washington, D.C., range from 200,000 to 800,000.
That is a wide range of estimates.
So, I was impressed by "March for Our Lives." It was apparently led by a student named Hogg, who is enrolled at the Florida high school where 17 students were murdered on February 14. In the midst of his studies, in less than six weeks, he put this international protest together. Amazing.
Not just amazing. Curious.
A typical account is the one in The New York Times. The reporter did not mention anything about how this march came to be. Like Topsy, the march just grew. You can read it here.
Demonstrators flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.At the main event in Washington, survivors of mass shootings, including the one in Florida, rallied a whooping crowd — “Welcome to the revolution,” said one of the student organizers — and spoke of communities that are disproportionately affected by gun violence. “It is normal to see flowers honoring the lives of black and brown youth that have lost their lives to a bullet,” Edna Chavez, 17, said of her South Los Angeles neighborhood.
Students did this. Not specific students. Just students.
This article is typical of investigative reporting of liberal causes in America's supposed newspaper of record: incurious.
The article did include a link to the website of the organization: https://marchforourlives.com. This was the place to begin searching for information about the origin of the march. The place where a reporter begins to find out who is behind a website is called www.whois.com, the site where domain names are registered. I looked up https://marchforourlives.com. Here is what I learned: the organization running the site chose to use a proxy in order to remain anonymous.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Wikipedia does offer this information:
Amal and George Clooney donated $500,000 to support the march and announced they would attend. Oprah Winfrey matched the Clooney donation to support the march. Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife Marilyn also contributed $500,000. Film director and producer Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw Spielberg donated $500,000, also matching the donation of the Clooneys. On February 23, Gucci announced they were also donating $500,000 towards the march.
In short, the usual suspects. But money alone -- not even $2.5 million -- does not produce protests on the same day on six continents in six weeks. People with remarkable organizational skills produce such events . . . and not in six weeks.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Then there was the issue of demographics. In an Op-Ed essay in The Washington Post we read this of the Washington, D.C. march:
Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March for Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. Further, participants were highly educated; 72 percent had a BA or higher.Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.
Participants were also more likely than those at recent marches to be first-time protesters. About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before. This group was less politically engaged in general: Only about a third of them had contacted an elected official in the past year, while about three-quarters of the more seasoned protesters had.
Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting.
Instead, new protesters reported being motivated by the issues of peace (56 percent) and Trump (42 percent), who has been a galvanizing force for many protests.
CONCLUSION
The March for Our Lives was the most remarkable organized political protest in my lifetime. It got more people into the streets in more locations in less than six weeks than any protest in history. If I am exaggerating, I would like to learn of what protest did more in the same time period.
So remarkable was this march that I am drawn to this conclusion: the anonymous organizers had been planning for such a protest long before February 14.
The following questions occur to me. First, who are these people? Second, how did the Hollywood donors know who these people were and what they had been planning? Third, how did they transfer the money? To what organization? Fourth, how long did the organizers plan for this? Fifth, who put up the money before the Hollywood crowd started writing checks?
These are simple questions. The journalists of the mainstream media have displayed a lack of curiosity regarding the international event/events. This, however, is not at all curious.
The topic would make a good Master's thesis -- maybe even a Ph.D. dissertation. I speak as someone who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation and who then got it in front of readers. The March for Our Lives is a topic far more deserving of a Ph.D. dissertation than the one I chose.