Me Too and Never Again: A Revolution in the making?

There is a revolution afoot and there may well be more to it than first meets the eye. In just the last few months and days since October of last year, the MeToo and NeverAgain movements have mushroomed up and flourished in the United States, in the face of stubborn indifference and intentional inaction at the highest levels of political power.

A sign of the times? Clearly. And a probable healthy reaction to the previous trend toward diminishing democracy and growing authoritarianism. Like the spark of all revolutions, this one could well kindle replications throughout the rest of the world as well. Especially throughout the West, where reactionaries have emerged victorious in Washington, while gaining a level of still minority but no less troubling strength in Europe, a trend not witnessed since the fascist prelude to World War II. These brand new liberal democratic movements are, then, an acute and immediate answer to attempted mob rule and to the undermining of individual rights—seen by the authoritarian-minded not as inalienable, but as bothersome and contrary to the goals of the ruling elite.
Ideas that spring from a passion for collective individual rights and justice tend to foster movements with enormous potential for the achievement of universality. This was true of the American and French Revolutions more than two centuries ago. It was that universality of democratic ideals that, in 1837, inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his poem Concord Hymn, to write:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The MeToo and NeverAgain movements are not, however, part of a shooting revolution. They are, on the contrary, simple yet revolutionary ideas that seek peace, justice and the defense of individual rights above all other considerations. But their effects could indeed end up being “a shot heard round the world” and as such, spawn other civil liberties movements to take back the freedoms that are being lost through the recent and fast-increasing encroachment of autocratic designs.
The MeToo movement emerged in mid-October of last year, following scandalous revelations about how renowned Hollywood cinema mogul Harvey Weinstein had for years used his power on the US movie scene to sexually harass, attack and subjugate actresses whose careers depended in large measure on his approval. Beyond the first dozen original denunciations against Weinstein—ranging from simple sexual harassment to rape—Charmed star Alyssa Milano began an awareness campaign encouraging other women to publicly denounce sexual harassment. “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a (social media) status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” she tweeted. And the response was overwhelming.

But she wasn’t the first to use the #MeToo hashtag. It was originally introduced by women’s rights advocate and community organizer Tarana Burke in 2006, to promote what she called “empowerment through empathy” among women of color who were victims of sexual abuse. Burke is also the creator of a documentary titled Me Too. She was inspired to use the phrase after finding herself unable to respond to a 13-year-old girl who confided that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke said she later wished she had simply told the girl, “me too”.
Alyssa Milano, for her part, used the hashtag to document the frequency and scale of sexual harassment and abuse not only in the film industry but also in other walks of life. The phrase immediately went viral on the social networks, setting off an absolute firestorm of MeToo admissions that have since abruptly ended the careers of actors, entertainers, politicians and other public figures, and shocked society with details of sexual harassment suffered by a long list of renowned women whom most people had formerly thought of as powerful, untouchable and immune to abuse. Their admissions in turn have given rise in the brief intervening months to public denunciations of sexual harassment, molestation and rape, by a long list of women in practically every field, as well as by a handful of men who have also stepped forward to publicly admit being sexually abused in the workplace.

An outgrowth of this burgeoning MeToo trend was the 2017 trial and sentencing of former sports physician Larry Nassar. Before he was handed an exemplary sentence of 175 years in prison (plus the 60-year sentence he had earlier received for participating in child pornography), Nassar sat through the unprecedented public courtroom drama of 156 women each individually confronting him and telling him how he had invaded and damaged their young lives—lives whose protection and care he was accountable for as a medical professional and sports doctor for a number of different girls’ and women’s athletic teams. That trial was not only of major importance as a legal precedent but also as an indication of the ground being gained by the MeToo movement (and its sequel, the TimesUp movement) in the fight for women’s rights.
As such, the MeToo movement is clearly becoming the “third wave” of the women’s rights movement, within the framework of the larger civil rights movement, which began in the early 20th century with the campaign for women’s suffrage, continued in the 1960s with the equal rights movement, and has now been re-born as the virally contagious MeToo trend.
The NeverAgain movement, meanwhile, was born, organized, and went stunningly viral in what may be world-record time—already having high-profile leaders, a name, a multi-million-user social media presence, and a national agenda just four days after the horrendous incident that gave birth to it: the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Broward County, Florida in the US, on February 14, in which 17 students and teachers were murdered and many more were injured. Considering the manifesto read out by Emma Gonzalez, one of the movement’s inspiring young firebrands, shortly after the massacre, the movement might well have also been dubbed “WeCallBS”.

After chiding American politicians saying, “To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA (the National Rifle Association, which lobbies for weapons manufacturers), shame on you,” the 17-year-old high schooler challenged the arguments for maintaining the US awash in automatic weapons by “calling BS” in response.
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us,” Gonzalez said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice, and our parents, to call BS. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.”
And she concluded by challenging, “If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.”

What network-savvy student leaders like Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, David Hogg and others, realized immediately was that if they wanted to make a difference in the name of their slaughtered teachers and schoolmates, they would have to put their own grief on hold and act fast. The window of opportunity for making their message go viral nation- and worldwide would be indeed small. If they hesitated for even a few days, their voices would be drowned out by the plethora of pro and con commentary across the political spectrum that would swiftly blow itself out like a tropical storm and be quickly forgotten, as was the horrendous mass shooting incident in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the night of October 1st, 2017, in which a lone gunman firing from an upper floor of a hotel managed to kill 58 people and wound more than 420 others before finally putting an end to the massacre by shooting himself.

As a result, in less than two weeks since the school shooting, the NeverAgain movement has garnered the support of millions of people on the social media, taken its cause and story international, eclipsed the business-as-usual line-up on mass communications and print news schedules, placed the federal administration in the uncomfortable position of having to respond to their demands or face a further drop in approval ratings, and definitively put all major politicians in their place regarding gun control—like when, in a CNN Town Hall, high school junior Cameron Kasky left veteran politician Marco Rubio shuffling his feet and stumbling for a response by asking the senator pointblank if he would commit to never again taking a dollar in campaign funds from the NRA. Kasky’s question came after Senator Rubio made facile claims to being on the side of the grieving students while insisting that a ban on large-capacity assault weapons was practically impossible.
But more importantly, the MeToo and NeverAgain movements have begun to connect, if, for the moment, indirectly, as the organizers of the worldwide Women’s March that took place the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January of 2017, have offered their help to the MeToo students in organizing their own “March for Our Lives” protest demonstration to be held next March 14.
The Women’s March is considered by many to be one of the most successful mass demonstrations in history. It drew 500,000 women in Washington alone, where the organizers said it was meant to send a bold message to Trump—whose past behavior had gained him a reputation as a misogynist who exploited and disrespected women—that women’s rights were human rights. Further subjects forming part of the protest included advocating legislation and policies regarding human rights and other issues, such as immigration reform, health care reform, reproductive rights, the natural environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights.

The Washington march was replicated in major cities across the US drawing more than three million protest marchers. Further connected marches took place in more than 180 cities in some 60 countries, involving an estimated five million marchers.
The inspiring conduct of the student leaders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who have given birth to the NeverAgain movement has, like that of members of the MeToo movement, broken with the liberal-conservative divisiveness that has characterized political and social debate for a decade, shaming many of those who have embraced such fundamentalist attitudes and seeking to unite major segments of society in the search for mutual solutions to pressing social issues.
In this sense, MeToo and NeverAgain have much more in common with the “flower power” generation’s counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s—which grew out of the anti-war and pro-civil rights movements of the day—than with democracy’s founding revolutions of the eighteenth century. They are a reminder that, while democracy may find itself badly wounded and in dire need of life-support, it is not dead. Rather, it is up to us, at a grass-roots level to rise up and demand its full restoration, as well as that of the rule of law, but within a democratic framework in which laws are designed to protect and defend the rights of the individual, not the vested interests of a super-wealthy elite or the ruling autocracy that it supports.