Richard Enos – “March For Our Lives” co-founder Cameron Kasky told Fox News radio last Wednesday that he has left the organization that he helped create. Perhaps it is the profound learning process he has gone through since being cast into the spotlight that makes him feel that his newfound ambitions and those of the #NeverAgain movement are no longer compatible.
Or perhaps it is something more. You may recall that in one of my first articles for CE, ‘Innocent Email Throws #NeverAgain Narrative Into Question,’ the point was made that the inaugural “March For Our Lives” gun-control demonstration that took place in Washington, DC had been planned months in advance, long before the Parkland shooting, and that those students who considered themselves the ‘organizers’ of this march were actually (wittingly or unwittingly) walking into a gun-control marketing campaign that already had a firm and steady foundation.
What Kasky Learned
Nonetheless, whether or not Kasky even realizes the extent of influence of a powerful hidden hand on the gun-control campaign is secondary. What is important is the growth in the young man’s consciousness since the movement began. In the beginning, Kasky’s rhetoric was far more polarizing than that of the forces he was fighting against. He now looks back at the things he said with some perspective:
I’m very regretful of a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Looking back on that it’s like you said, I’m not going to kick myself for it because I’m 17. Despite the fact that I thought I did at the time, I don’t know everything.
This is seminal wisdom at any stage in life, let alone at 17. Not unlike Socrates’ dictum ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ a statement that inevitably secured his position as the wisest man in 5th century B.C. Athens, Kasky has hit upon the kind of humility and self-awareness that is essential to help us make our way out the polarized climate of the gun-control debate and of left-right politics in general.
Informed By His Experiences
Perhaps the difference for Kasky came as a result of being willing to listen to people on the other side rather than continuing to simply rant on the virtues of his side of the polarity (or the vices of the other side) during his summer crusades:
This summer when March For Our Lives went on the summer tour that we embarked on, I met that person in Texas who’s got that semi-automatic weapon because that’s how they like to protect their family. I met the 50 some-odd percent of women who are pro-life, even though I thought it was preposterous that a woman could be pro-life and not pro-choice at the time.
I learned that a lot of our issues politically come from a lack of understanding of other perspectives and also the fact that so often young conservatives and young liberals will go into debate, like I said earlier, trying to beat the other one as oppose to come to an agreement…I’m working on some efforts to encourage bipartisanship or at least discussion that is productive and help a lot of people avoid the mistakes that I made.
If everybody on both sides of the political debate would heed these simple words, indeed virtually all of our political problems would vanish, and we would all be working together, despite maintaining some differences about how we should live, in order to create a better environment for everyone. The reality, though, is that those who run the political game from behind the scenes know that division and polarization helps them maintain control over our society, and far from trying to remedy it, they constantly stoke it to advance their agenda.