Every Friday morning at 7:30 a.m., you can find us at the corner of Orange Avenue and 3rd Street. We are high school students, on public sidewalks, holding up signs with our friends. Every week we spend a simple hour one morning to call out the crimes and atrocities being committed by our government, and in the process we bolster everyone’s First Amendment right to peacefully assemble.
Many of us come from active-duty military families stationed at the various bases across San Diego, with parents who have spent their lives defending America. Some of our grandparents still carry the burdens of what they witnessed in service to the United States. Our family members fought to defend and protect the freedom of America, and we continue to protect those freedoms every time we stand together in the mornings.
Peaceful protest is the most American thing a citizen can do. The right to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances was a value before the Constitution even existed. The founders placed it alongside freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press because they understood that without the ability to gather, to speak, and to demand accountability, every other right is threatened.
The highest levels of courts have repeatedly agreed. In Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization (1939), the Supreme Court established that streets and sidewalks, just like our corner of Orange and 3rd, are traditional public forums where First Amendment rights are at their strongest. In Edwards v. South Carolina (1963), the Court overturned the arrests of student protesters who had gathered peacefully on government grounds, affirming that the Constitution “does not permit a State to make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views.”
To the unhappy neighbors who have labeled our Friday gatherings as “divisive,” we call you to look into the history textbooks that students like us have been studying for years. The history of American progress is a history of people taking to the streets. The Boston Tea Party. The suffragists who marched for women’s right to vote. The veterans of the civil rights movement who linked arms on bridges and marched through hostility to demand equality under the law. Were they divisive? Perhaps in the moment. But history has judged them as patriots, and the changes they made as crucial. We know that history will judge us the same way.
Dissent is democracy in action. A government that goes unchallenged is not a democracy, but a cult of sheep and shepherds. The men and women in our families who deployed to foreign conflicts did not do so to protect a country where citizens are forced to blindly accept the decisions of those in power.
They fought for a nation where everyday citizens have the freedom, and the responsibility, to speak up, and be loud about it. We have been grateful for the media coverage our gatherings have received.
We want Coronado, and the wider community, to see us clearly. We are not agitators. We are attentive and aware students. We are teenagers who read the news, who study history, who understand that rights not exercised are rights at risk. We gather every Friday with love for the country our parents and grandparents served, and out of concern for the country we hope to soon inherit. Love and concern is what has driven dozens of our classmates to join us for one week, or for many, and we hope you are compelled with love and concern as well.
We hope that when you see us, that you will see something powerful. Something American. Something absolutely, fundamentally necessary. We’ll be at Orange and 3rd again next Friday at 7:30 a.m. We hope to see you there.
Sean Wilbur and Anika Talavera are seniors at Coronado High School.
