The March for Our Lives will last a few hours. Its impact will last a generation.
Washington Post, Mar 23, 2018: On Oct. 15, 1969, in 10,000 high schools across the United States, students skipped classes to demand a halt to the Vietnam War. The mass demonstration, dubbed the Moratorium, was “a march against death.” Protesting a war that seemed all but lost, yet still cost more than $2 billion each month, activists called for a nationwide general strike to stop “business as usual.”
Streets filled with rallies and prayer vigils. Church bells tolled and workers struck. Municipal buildings were draped in black crepe, and American flags flew at half-staff. The best estimate was that 2 million Americans demonstrated that day. Life magazine judged the protest “the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country.”
The memory of the Moratorium — its breadth and its limits — strikingly echoes the strident efforts of high school protesters today. The survivors of the Feb. 14 massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have taken the vanguard to insist on not just “common sense” but thoughtful and significant gun reform. And like antiwar dissenters’ general demands for peace, the #NeverAgain movement has called more often for systemic change rather than a specific plank of reforms. The Moratorium experience reveals that beginning a process of reform takes time, but persistence may eventually pay off — both in ways seen at the time and ones not visible for years to come…
(Photo: A silent vigil on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 15, 1969, the day of the widespread Moratorium protests against the Vietnam War. (AP))