Let’s Become Uncontrollable: A Response to #MarchForOurLives

This following editorial raises important critiques of the recent #MarchForOurLives demonstrations.

It should be noted that the March for Our Lives is backed by wealthy celebrities and the Democratic party establishment. It’s an attempt to recuperate alienated young people back into the political fold. The fact that rowdier walk outs that attacked the police, smashed police cars, trashed stores, looted, and beat up fascist trolls were said to be “hurting the movement” and “not helping” while posing for the cameras and carrying out the agenda of a wealthy neoliberal elite is seen as the best way to help the movement.

This is respectability politics and recuperation at its finest. Our country keeps having these horrible tragedies at the hands of angry, alienated (mostly) young white men because our culture lionizes purifying violence carried out by white men as a solution to their problems. When the mass deaths are carried out by “legitimate” actors like the police or military these men are valorized and celebrated.

Men like George S. Patton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Armstrong Custer, Andrew “Stonewall” Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and many others are celebrated for their actions on the battlefield which often included the wanton killing of women and children. Police officers kill hundreds of people a year and 99% of them never face charges and murder convictions are so rare that when even one happens the police act like they are under attack.

Our society sees the violence of the State to be legitimate, and the violence it contracts out to the bootlickers who enable it, is celebrated. When that violence comes back to bite us in the ass whether its in conflictual and potentially liberatory ways like the Ferguson and Baltimore riots or in a brutal expression of the dominating hegemony like in Charlottesville, Sandy Hook, Austin, Parkland, and so many others it is universally condemned and the managers of this society are hand wringing and wondering what can be done to prevent this from ever happening again.

The solution seems to be from both sides of the political spectrum that there must be more prisons, more cops, more guns in the hands of authority figures, more hegemonic control and panoptical surveillance over our daily lives and less control in our hands and a further diminished ability for us to fight back. If we are to have any hope to put a stop to incidents like what happened in Parkland and what has happened to so many other communities scarred by mass shootings, we need to put an end to this hell world civilization that seems to only become more dystopian, alienating, dehumanizing, and dare I say Orwellian by the day.

Instead of pushing for further control over our lives, let’s become uncontrollable.