About six months ago I was back in high school, dreadingly walking from class to class when a CNN alert popped up on my phone, reporting a shooting in none other than a locker-filled institution comprising thousands of kids just like me. It was the infamous Parkland shooting in Stoneman Douglas High School. While it reawakened the never-ending gun debate, there was an immediate distinction to both the shooting in Parkland and the national response. Even my high school, as distant and safe as it may have seemed, began to kick and scream because there was some indescribable desperation that millions of ineligible voters I like to call “high schoolers” were acting on.

One month after the shooting, the nation rallied in the March for Our Lives movement, during which Emma González, delivered an incredibly powerful and articulate speech. She stood up in front of thousands of crushed people at a time when everyone wanted to turn their brokenness into a fierce, aggressive, political fight against those thwarting gun reform. In her speech, González calls to her audience, “everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands” as if the pain is felt by those who can still hear the gunshots ringing in their ears. In some ways her speech feels like a rhetorical echo of suffering so that the old, corrupt, white males in power might hear how those marching are feeling.  You could call this persuasion, however, I believe it is this desperation to translate cold, heartless agony into a beautiful activism that fuels the rhetoric in her speech. And so it is almost shallow to call her speech “persuasive” when it encompasses a message that is so vulnerable and human. In our discussion about Lloyd Bitzer’s piece “The Rhetorical Situation,” students struggled to separate persuasion and rhetoric. However, if you watch her six-minute-long speech you will “feel” rhetoric. When Emma says “fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job” she uses the dire fear of gun violence to tap into the vulnerable who might actually step up to the plate and do something. At the same time, I am sure that if you have a Ph.D. in rhetorical analysis or some fancy degree in the hard sciences, you are laughing at the idea of “feeling” rhetoric. But as I sit here watching a six-month-old speech delivered by Emma González, trying not to cry, I am absorbed by the emotion flowing through her and the audience. Rhetoric soaks the audience in this passion for beautiful change while persuasion, well, it persuades.

Emma González delivered a speech at Washington’s March for Our Lives on March 24. Credit: Washington Post

Kairos is immensely prevalent in her speech. I know of very few more powerful reasons to act than the dread of kids being killed in school. You can sense the Kairos in every moving word and in each heavy second of silence. In the same way that MLK Junior’s “I Have a Dream” speech was fueled by the high-pressure fire hoses a few months earlier, González tapped into her audience through a detailed elaboration of something unacceptable. In history, some of the most rhetorically compelling speeches have come during times of great need. Emma González’s speech not only enacts change because of how horrifying the shooting was, but because she chooses to deliver her speech with brokenness and vulnerability that most Americans can relate to.