Kerry's comments on the march this weekend [View all]
A Washington Post article quotes from an email that John Kerry sent the reporter.
“Every historic moment has its own power, and these young people deserve their own moment,” the former secretary of state told me in an email early this morning. “Many of them have earned the right to be heard through a shared loss that innocents should never experience. Their moral clarity defies politics or partisanship. … These young people have touched the conscience of the country about common sense on guns, and they have the power to make it a voting issue again.”
Kerry became an antiwar activist after volunteering as a Naval officer in Vietnam, an experience that profoundly shaped his worldview and service in the Senate. “They were compelled because they’d seen friends suffer and die for a policy that they thought was a mistake,” he explained, referring to the veterans who became protesters. “Because they’d served, they couldn’t be dismissed by Spiro Agnew and the Nixon White House. The same way, these young people from Parkland and all over the country can’t be written off by mere politicians. Their moral authority is unimpeachable.”
The 74-year-old also sees analogues between the March for Our Lives and the movement to protect the environment, another issue that many view in existential terms. “The environment was written off for a long time as a minor issue,” he writes. “Earth Day 1970 changed all of that when millions filled the streets of America and turned the environment into a voting issue and forced [Richard] Nixon to create the EPA.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/03/26/daily-202-how-the-marches-for-gun-control-are-like-the-protests-against-vietnam/5ab864bb30fb042a378a2e6d/?utm_term=.9adc047b9967
Earlier Kerry had responded to an Emma Gonzales tweet praising her eloquence.
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