A DEAFENING SILENCE THAT MADE IT’S POINT

….The Stoneman Douglas High School senior and survivor, Emma Gonzalez

 

Emma Gonzalez’s silence became the silent scream and the most powerful moment of the day.

 

The most galvanizing event at the March For Our Lives demonstration of 800,000 Americans in Washington DC, occurred at the very end of the March’s many speakers.  That was when the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior and survivor of the Feb. 14 mass shooting delivered the final speech.

 

The speaker, Emma González, began her speech by offering the attendees and the TV cameras, 6 minutes and 20 seconds of silence, complete with tears running down her cheeks.  The silent minutes were exactly how long the assailant had taken to kill 17 students and teachers before he ditched his weapon and mingled with the escaping students.  The assailant was then free for over an hour before he was apprehended.  

 

Those wordless minutes moved the masses at the event, and in the nation, as well as millions of those watching around the globe.

 

Many nations outside the United States had also joined in the student sponsored event including those from Canada, Mexico, and many countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.

 

The scene was brought on, on a cold, clear, Saturday, and on an impressive outdoor Washington DC stage before scores of faces.

 

Ms. Gonzalez, who has become one of the most prominent voices in the #NeverAgain movement, went on with her silence that became the silent scream and the most powerful moment of the day.

 

The absence of hearing any language, the extended pause for contemplation, remains a rare thing in public discourse, and even rarer when performed on a stage for millions.

 

We are aware that a moment of silence is a ritualized form of respect that we employ on many occasions to mark a tragedy, but it’s usually only for that short moment. González’s silence was an act that felt, in its way, totally radical.  It was as if she had dropped her mic, but the mic was still in front of her. The silence went on for about five minutes before a cable news camera began sweeping the crowd. 

 

You could tell that some people did not know quite what to do with themselves.  But Gonzalez continued to fix her gaze into the distance, as if she were concentrating on something out of our normal range of perception.  At times, she trembled and wiped away her tears, and in the crowd some people started to chant, or applaud, perhaps because the rule in our society seems to be that if there is a vacuum of noise, someone has to fill it.

 

It was a reminder to me of how little we appreciate in today’s culture that the most powerful instant can be one that we don’t try to put into words.  After naming all those that died in the Parkland, Fla., massacre, and identifying their experiences, González simply just stopped talking. The rest was a deafening silence.

 

The interruptions of the silence were respectful, and eventually, as González steadfastly held her tongue, the hubbub did die down.  We were all then left with the image of a young, grieving woman, drawing our attention not to herself, but to something much more abstract.  To the actual time, the amount of time it took for a killer to mow down her classmates and teachers.

 

I personally believe that this heartbroken student was reaching for her own inspiration of a very difficult time.  I am also aware that several of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students at the forefront of the gun-control activism had participated in the school’s Drama Club, including Ms. Gonzalez.  They were very smart students and they understood that for their presentation to sink in, they had to do something on a Shakespearian level to actually sink in and to leave that lasting impression.

In the stage play of Hamlet, Shakespeare has Hamlet declare that  “words, words, words,” were what were required to explain life and death.  But it is appearing that Ms. Gonzales and the juniors and seniors of this Florida high school have reminded us that perhaps, it’s a different, extended and  silent dialogue that is actually required for that explanation.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018