About 550 St. Thomas students, faculty, staff and community members gathered on J.P. Monahan Plaza Wednesday morning to participate in St. Thomas’ March For Our Lives demonstration.
The demonstration included 17 minutes of silence. During each minute, a student held a poster displaying the name of a victim of the Parkland, Florida shooting, which happened exactly one month earlier.
Junior Christian Heisler walked out of his class to participate in the demonstration.
“I thought it was really cool to see so many people come out and show their support for an issue that’s becoming more and more relevant everyday,” he said. “The fact that we could be any of those students (affected by gun violence) really hits home with a lot of people, and I think that drives a lot more people to get out and take action.”
Sophomore Bizzy Stephenson read a poem she wrote, titled 17, to all the participants to close the demonstration.
“What separates any of us from any of the 17 names we now have ringing in our ears?” she read. “I am a name on a poster. Fill in the blank … I am one incident away from being a trending hashtag or a viral photo of a victim.”
Senior Maria Stephenson, Bizzy’s sister, was proud of the poem and emotionally moved by the event.
“We have a younger sister who is 14, and a lot of those (victims) were 14, and it just really made me think how hard it is for those families,” Maria said. “Looking at those signs made me really think about how those people had lives, just like our sister.”
An almost surreal moment came as Bizzy Stephenson finished her speech, when participants looked up to see a bald eagle soar over the crowd.
Afterward, participants were invited into the Anderson Student Center and add post-it notes to two boards labeled “Thoughts and Prayers” and “Ideas for Action.”
Some ideas were simple: pray for victims, listen to others and vote. Others were very specific: don’t let people with histories of domestic assault obtain guns and use gun policies from countries with less violence.
The organizers, St. Thomas students Danielle Wong, Bizzy Stephenson, Sofía Leyva, Kaitlyn Spratt and Tessa Schmitz, said they will take participants’ ideas for action and research ways that they can be achieved, which they will post to the event’s Facebook page early next week.
Bizzy Stephenson was very happy with the turnout, and hopes the event will have a positive impact on St. Thomas.
“Hopefully people who don’t normally see themselves as progressive or protesters got something out of this,” she said.
Lauren Andrego can be reached at lauren.andrego@stthomas.edu.