The Syracuse March for Our Lives on Saturday featured strong appeals to government solutions, voting and open collaboration with the police. And while some leftists don’t like the march’s lack of radicalism, every activist has to start somewhere.

Complaining that the marchers didn’t stand behind organizations such as Black Lives Matter in past protests and aren’t connecting police violence to mass shootings is counterintuitive. If we as leftists want to see young activists organizing for a better world, we need to give them the tools to do that — not show up late and tell them they’ve been doing it wrong.

Political activism relies on a learning curve. Some people learn faster than others, but we must be patient with advocates.

When individuals become politically aware, they usually respond with action. They don’t wait to act until they can pass a pop quiz on the Communist Manifesto. Something affects their lives to such a degree that they feel compelled to do something about it. And so they do.

People who become politicized in a relatively short period of time do what’s familiar to them. In the United States, our general understanding of politics is that we vote people into office, we tell them what we want and, if we’re lucky, they do it.

New activists take cues from the institutions around them. They’ll follow the rituals of political participation because they don’t have any other options on the table. When people get emotional and tell you to vote, it’s not because they’ve considered all the options and think that’s the best one. It’s because voting seems like the only option.

To build a better world, we must develop alternatives to the institutions that dominate public life. That means being visible and accountable in cultivating the world we want to see. If leftists are active in building a better world, we’ll have more legitimacy than the institutions that oversee this violent, destructive reality. The new activists looking for a guiding light will be overwhelmed by our brilliance.

My favorite speech of the Syracuse event was unplanned. A woman who lost her son to gang violence discussed the incompleteness of policy solutions. She said we need to move away from a culture of violence.

She was making this appeal to community leaders to de-escalate the cycle of violence. But we can all be community leaders. We can choose to mobilize against capitalism, mass incarceration and violence, rather than throw our support into a political race based on corporate greed, lobbying and sponsorship. We can acknowledge our power and act on it without their help.

Let’s be clear: We don’t want an end to gun violence, but all violence, period. Only regulating guns is like slapping a Band-Aid on a broken bone. We must deal with the deeper issues of systemic violence and the effects it has on society at large.

Sam Norton is a senior advertising and psychology dual major. He can be reached at sanorton@syr.edu.

Published on March 25, 2018 at 8:07 pm