Liu is CEO and co-founder of Citizen University.
Last week I was at Disneyland with my daughter. When you’re there, it’s like a dream — a time-distorting swirl of people and sound and color. But as in a dream, certain details lodge in waking memory. One that has stuck in my mind is a burly young white father, ambling outside Fantasyland, wearing a T-shirt with a silhouette of a semiautomatic rifle and the words "Come and take it." This was days after Buffalo, and days before Uvalde.
This was, in short, just another day in America. But the reason that man and his T-shirt and his child stuck with me is that he felt it was utterly normal to wear such a shirt. In a way, it was.
"Come and take it" is the slogan of gun-rights absolutists who think any effort to promote gun responsibility and safety is a tyrannical assault on their liberty that must be met with … assault rifles. It is defiant and petulant. It is threatening. And though it tries to project strength and bravado, it betrays deep weakness and sickness. In the guns debate, only one is armed to the teeth. Yet that side acts as if it is cornered, helpless, has nowhere else to turn.
Cornered, helpless, nowhere else to turn is how those students and teachers in Texas felt yesterday and those grocery shoppers in New York felt last week. Cornered, helpless, nowhere to turn is how so many of us today feel about the national epidemic of gun violence — about the diseased state of our norms, the comatose state of our democratic institutions.
But we are not in fact helpless.
This morning I met with a group of high school students from the West Side and South Side of Chicago. Black and brown, from neighborhoods that lack grocery stores, well-paved streets, youth development programs, job opportunities. They have reason to be as angry and defiant and petulant as that Disneyland man. They have reason to be cynical about how much attention gets paid to mass shootings and school shootings when 19 shot to death is a routine, overlooked two-week tally in Chicago.
They were, instead, compassionate and purposeful. They felt for the families and neighbors of Buffalo and Uvalde even as they feel for their own families and neighbors. They want more voice, in their school and in their city. They are learning to organize and advocate. They spoke of the need for better laws on guns and better policies on mental health. They spoke as much of the need for better norms. The world does not expect or allow them to be full human beings with deep potential and wide interests. Still, they keep pushing to be their full selves. They feel most powerful, they said, when they are keeping the peace, standing up for others, calling out injustice, organizing protest, figuring out who decides things and making them listen. They are redefining what it means to be age 17 on the West Side — what people expect of you and what you expect of yourself.
None of us is powerless right now because all of us can change the culture of our community. That man in the "Come and take it" T-shirt is doing his best to change the culture, to shift the boundaries of what is normal and OK in public life.
We can do as those Chicago Public School students do, and commit to setting a different kind of example. We can learn from Sari Kaufman, a member of CU’s Civic Collaboratory and one of the survivors of the 2018 Parkland gun massacre: she didn’t just become a leader of the March for Our Lives movement; she created a project called MyVote to connect young people to local elections because she learned the hard way that change in this country comes from the local outward and the bottom up.
It is hard, when we are flooded by grief and numbed by death, to exercise civic imagination. But this is when we need it most. There is a different society to be had. One in which a teenager like the Texas shooter, a kid with a lisp and a stutter, isn’t bullied and shunned, doesn’t withdraw, doesn’t have easier access to firearms than to friends or counselors or opportunities to thrive. One in which gun owners, the day after, the minute after a massacre, do not harden their hearts and double down on talking points about "politicizing" guns but instead imagine what it’d be like to be there and then become the champions of responsible reforms. One in which people young and old recognize that the more we dehumanize each other the more we will kill each other and live in fear of being killed. One in which we are a strong people, able to integrate power and character, who don’t wait for strong leaders but in fact lead our leaders.
That is the society that every person I work with is trying to create. That is the culture we at Citizen University are trying to foster. It is what is in your power to make, at every scale from neighborhood to nation.
Come and build it.
This article was first published by Citizen University.
An Independent Voter's Perspective on Current Political Divides
In the column, "Is Donald Trump Right?", Fulcrum Executive Editor, Hugo Balta, wrote:
For millions of Americans, President Trump’s second term isn’t a threat to democracy—it’s the fulfillment of a promise they believe was long overdue.
Is Donald Trump right?
Should the presidency serve as a force for disruption or a safeguard of preservation?
Balta invited readers to share their thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
David Levine from Portland, Oregon, shared these thoughts...
I am an independent voter who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election.
I pay very close attention to the events going on, and I try and avoid taking other people's opinions as fact, so the following writing should be looked at with that in mind:
Is Trump right? On some things, absolutely.
As to DEI, there is a strong feeling that you cannot fight racism with more racism or sexism with more sexism. Standards have to be the same across the board, and the idea that only white people can be racist is one that I think a lot of us find delusional on its face. The question is not whether we want equality in the workplace, but whether these systems are the mechanism to achieve it, despite their claims to virtue, and many of us feel they are not.
I think if the Democrats want to take back immigration as an issue then every single illegal alien no matter how they are discovered needs to be processed and sanctuary cities need to end, every single illegal alien needs to be found at that point Democrats could argue for an amnesty for those who have shown they have been Good actors for a period of time but the dynamic of simply ignoring those who break the law by coming here illegally is I think a losing issue for the Democrats, they need to bend the knee and make a deal.
I think you have to quit calling the man Hitler or a fascist because an actual fascist would simply shoot the protesters, the journalists, and anyone else who challenges him. And while he definitely has authoritarian tendencies, the Democrats are overplaying their hand using those words, and it makes them look foolish.
Most of us understand that the tariffs are a game of economic chicken, and whether it is successful or not depends on who blinks before the midterms. Still, the Democrats' continuous attacks on the man make them look disloyal to the country, not to Trump.
Referring to any group of people as marginalized is to many of us the same as referring to them as lesser, and it seems racist and insulting.
We invite you to read the opinions of other Fulrum Readers:
Trump's Policies: A Threat to Farmers and American Values
The Trump Era: A Bitter Pill for American Renewal
Federal Hill's Warning: A Baltimorean's Reflection on Leadership
Also, check out "Is Donald Trump Right?" and consider accepting Hugo's invitation to share your thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
The Fulcrum will select a range of submissions to share with readers as part of our ongoing civic dialogue.
We offer this platform for discussion and debate.