Marching for something, getting nothing

Students walked out of classes yesterday, one month after 17 people were massacred at a Florida high school. Students, many of whom had the support of school administrators, were protesting the lack of progress on school safety and gun control legislation and vowing to never again allow crazed gunmen to kill innocent students in school buildings.

Hundreds of thousands of students protested Wednesday, and many expressed optimism that their vocal support for restrictions on gun sales and their massive numbers of protests would turn the tide in favor of greater security against massacres at the hands of demented young men. With perhaps millions of determined young people — voters — lined up in favor of change, how could they not succeed?

Wednesday's nationwide protests merely convince me more than ever that lining up thousands upon thousands of people to march in protest in hundreds of cities and towns across the country is not a successful strategy for change. If it were, previous marches and protests after earlier mass shootings would have succeeded. Thousands marched and protested after innocent children were killed. Sobbing parents described their losses. The inconceivable grief of burying one's children shined in the eyes of American voters and elected officials, who had to be moved by the survivors' anguish. But nothing was changed.

Donald Trump's inauguration protesters filled the National Mall, perhaps the largest demonstration in U.S. history. The marchers were determined, filled with zeal, determined to counter the Trump presidency. Fourteen months after the march, Trump is still president, still doing what he does, and his supporters appear more pleased than ever with their choice of president.

Women around the world have marched in protest of the lewd behavior, sexual harassment and sexual extortion by men in entertainment and politics. These marches have raised some awareness, but it's doubtful that misbehaving boys will suddenly be embarrassed into behaving themselves and respecting women they encounter.

When I was younger and less jaded about the way things work, I participated in a couple of protest marches over the Vietnam War, the celebrated cause of that day. Those protests appear successful; Lyndon Johnson declined to run for another term, and casualties began to decline. But what really ended the Vietnam War protests was Richard Nixon, a man as shrewd as he was dishonest. He realized he could defuse the protests by first limiting the military draft through a lottery system that reduced the uncertainty and motivation of protesters with high draft numbers. He completed his strategy by eliminating the draft altogether, and the protests quieted.

But the civil rights marches of the 1950s and '60s worked, didn't they? Yes, they did, but their success was not so much the result of the protesters' moral, ethical and humanitarian arguments against segregation. What shifted public opinion was not so much the cogent, eloquent arguments of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. It was not the protesters but the violence launched against the protesters that changed America's mind. The cruelty of the police dogs, billy clubs, fire hoses, tear gas, gunshots and firebombs — all played out on the nightly television news — shifted public opinion. Even then, the change took decades to take hold.

Protest as you please. It's your constitutional right, but don't expect speedy change unless you partner street protests with direct appeals to elected officials, voter turnout in elections, fundraising for like-minded candidates, advocacy for change in the system that makes political office holders pay more attention to big corporations than to their own constituents.

The Founding Fathers did not protest in the streets and expect miraculous changes. They organized meetings and developed new systems of government with guarantees against the abuses they saw in the status quo. The sold their concept to the public in all 13 colonies, and then there was change!