Hundreds gathered on Library Mall Wednesday evening to stand in solidarity with the Parkland, Fla. community and to honor the 17 lives lost during the mass shooting that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Feb. 14.
Students and Madison community members congregated at dusk to listen to speakers ranging from recent MSD alumni that are currently attending UW-Madison and previous Parkland community members to local anti-violence activists.
“I think it’s really important to relate this to the campus. It’s a few thousand miles away, so it’s sometimes hard to make this feel like home, in a way,” said Robyn Ribotsky, UW-Madison senior, MSD alumna and speaker at the vigil. “So I hope by all of us speaking, our stories can resonate and build some type of energy within the audience that they feel as passionate as we do about reforming all of these issues.”
For Sarah Nguyen, a Monona resident and mother, her presence at the event stemmed from frustration with
“It’s happening to all of us. I have literal PTSD. I walked to her school to pick her up and I was imagining somebody, ‘Oh, look, somebody could blow them away,’ because there’s too much access to my kids,” Nguyen said. “And she’s nine. So, yeah, I’ve been crying daily.”
Other supporters included former Parkland residents showing support for their hometown community from afar and echoing similar sentiments of calls for change.
“I think it’s definitely important that the Parkland community knows that people around the nation are all supporting them and that we all want change. This isn’t just a one-time problem. This has happened in the past and it needs to be changed,” said Joely Arai, UW-Madison freshman and Parkland native.
Jared Kaufman, UW-Madison senior and MSD alumnus, shared with the crowd his experience hearing about the shooting at his alma mater while sitting in a library and rushing outside to call his younger brother, who currently attends MSD, and hearing him relay details of the shooting.
“Hearing these words paralyzed me. I now knew how serious this was. The chills down my spine were something words will never describe,” Kaufman said. “This was my home.”
UW-Madison junior and MSD alumna Rachel Nicolaison spoke on living the reality of an issue that many people assume will never affect them until it does.
“We don’t get to be ignorant about this anymore. We don’t get to ignore how real of an issue this is or how much of a possibility this is. We don’t get to think, ‘oh, it won’t happen to us,’ because it did,”
Event speaker and Everytown for Gun Safety spokesperson Khary
“It is now our sacred duty to stitch these names into our hearts forever, and we will. But our hearts have become patchworks, and are weakened by all the little pieces that are sewn together,”
“We stand with you and yours. We will carry you. We will hold you. Your sacrifice matters, and while your hearts may be beyond broken, so are ours,”
The event was organized by Associated Students of Madison representative Jordan Madden as an attempt to both organize in support of the Parkland community and to facilitate conversations of policy change. According to Madden, all of the speakers at the event contacted him hoping to contribute to the vigil.
“We live, right now, in the generation of mass shootings,” Madden said. “My elementary school I remember this happening all the time, and my high school, and for some reason it stopped while I was at college, having active shooter drills and protocols to follow when things like this happen, and it’s going to be our generation when myself and several other people take public office that these things will actually change.”
Madden called upon the crowd to vote in the November elections as a measure in addressing the need to enact policy change.
After the speakers concluded, the crowd, escorted by police, proceeded to march down State Street. The march concluded at the capitol building where Rev. Jerry Hancock of the First Congregational United Church of Christ and president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort led supporters in a non-denominational prayer for peace.
Ribotsky, along with several other speakers, concluded her speech by acknowledging the bravery of the “survivors turned activists” of the MSD shooting and their role in bringing about the change that so many at the vigil called for.
“I have no doubt that these survivors and young leaders are going to change the world,” Ribotsky said. “They give me hope for the future, and I’m confident that my fellow Eagles and many of us standing here right now will go down in history as the students that used this tragedy as a catalyst for lasting change that will echo across our country all the way to our nation’s capital.”
Video by Chris Lueneburg
