(The following speech was delivered on the steps of City Hall by Samohi student Sara Javerbaum.)
Tell me if you’ve heard this before: this walkout is meaningless. It won’t make a difference, or it’s just an excuse to cut classes.
To clarify for those who may believe that, we’re not here because we think this walkout will remove Trump from office, or even get his attention, but rather to practice self-advocacy and to prove that we as students can and will mobilize to challenge oppression and injustice.
Even so, I understand why some people feel like this walkout isn’t going to accomplish anything. When we are flooded with headline after headline about these acts of injustice – whether it’s Trump citing DEI as the cause of an airplane crash or claiming we could TAKE OVER THE GAZA STRIP– it can make you feel powerless. To deal with this fear, we often resort to reductive statements. A phrase I’ve heard the most is, “this country is such a joke.”
But it’s no joke that RFK Jr, our Nation’s Health Secretary, claims vaccines cause autism and refuses to acknowledge healthcare as a human right. It’s no joke that the CDC webpage took down its page on HIV care, a symbolic act that isn’t just a rejection of the queer community, but an erasure of the queer community. It’s no joke that our president calls climate change a hoax, has already left the Paris climate accord and ordered the elimination of any policy positions, directives or funding “which reference or relate in any way to climate change, greenhouse gas, environmental justice, and more”.
It’s no joke that our president plans to deport 11 million “illegal immigrants”– people he refers to as criminals and economic leeches but who we know to be tax-paying friends, family, and invaluable members of our communities. It’s no joke that our democracy is falling, and slipping into oligarchy.
Trump wants to strip the history of civil rights and slavery and erase America’s wrongdoings from our textbooks and classrooms. He wants to cut funding from schools that teach about biology and gender identity, and defund and destroy the department of education. It’s not to make our country more “patriotic”, as he claims, but to keep us in the dark. Trump and his allies strip money from education systems to silence us – to keep us from thinking critically enough to critique him, to weaken our media literacy and understanding of the political mechanisms that decide our human rights. I urge you to acknowledge the severity of this threat to our education, because we already feel powerless and apathetic. I’d like to read a quote from the dystopian novel 1984 that explains the frustrations between knowing right v wrong, but feeling powerless.
“His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!”
We are extremely privileged in that we expect that our school will continue to foster our critical thinking and media literacy skills, but we protest so that all students in America are given the tools to defend the obvious, silly, and true in the face of intimidation, and lies. To do this, we need to defend our education systems fervently.
Today, we are here to ask the city of Santa Monica to stand with us. But I have another request for you all. To those of you in the crowd or at home who don’t think this walkout is going to do anything, remind yourself that that’s exactly how this new administration, and all fascist governments like it, wants you to feel. And to all of you, I am asking you to reject apathy. Pull yourself out from the tar pit of helplessness and harness your anger to speak UP and OUT. There are few things that scare the billionaires that now run this country, but there is nothing more radical, more terrifying, than unity. Stand with your peers and make your voice heard. We’re listening.
