Responding to the Controversies over my March for Life Remarks

Last updated on: January 28, 2019 at 6:19 am by Mary Pezzulo

Responding to the Controversies over my March for Life Remarks 2019-01-28T06:19:10-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Just once I’d like to go viral for a piece of writing I’m proud of.

I like to write short stories and thought I’d be a novelist someday; I also write meditations on prayers and antiphons and the like. But when my posts get shared over a thousand times, it’s always because Mrs. Pezzulo has gotten angry with conservatives again.

I just don’t like politics. I like to talk about other things.

Anyway, I gave my opinion on the situation with the Covington Catholic youth at the March for Life, and I got a lot of questions and feedback; I’ve seen even more around the internet directed at anyone who’s seen the videos.

I will venture to answer them here.

Q: Mrs Pezzulo, where did they get the MAGA hats? Did the chaperones provide them?

A: No, no, as far as I can tell it’s simpler than that. They probably just bought them from vendors at the March for Life. To give you an idea of how old I am, back when I used to bus out to the March for Life the vendors were giving away cardboard pirate hats, which turned out to actually be Revolutionary War hats, in honor of Ron Paul, because he was running for president as a libertarian. I did not take one.

Q: Mrs. Pezzulo, you’ve been duped by fake news. You need to watch the long video.

A: I did, or at least I watched several videos, and I also read some of the eyewitness testimony and even the tweets of the Covington Catholic kids themselves. What I saw every time I watched was that there was a very small group of African American protesters who have been erroneously called “Black Muslims” and “Black Lives Matter.” They’re apparently a movement called “Black Hebrew Israelites,” and they’re apparently in that part of DC every day. These men were shouting very weird, offensive things at everyone including allegedly the Native Americans who were there for their political demonstration that day. Everybody started shouting at each other. Not surprisingly, they decided to shout at the gang of what looked like sixty or so mostly white, prep school kids in MAGA hats and call them “crackers” and other things. Those men were behaving badly. The Covington Catholic students responded in a way that was at minimum shockingly imprudent and certainly looked racist to me. They might more wisely have stared straight ahead and ignored the protesters, or walked to another part of the memorial to wait for their ride, or walked further up the steps and pretended to enjoy looking at the monument until the bus came, something like that. In my day we probably would’ve started praying the Rosary obnoxiously loudly, and I’m not saying that’s a good response. But it’s a lot safer a bet than whooping and booing and laughing and randomly doing prep school chants ten feet from a group of very weird protesters.

Nathan Philips then showed up with a few other Native American gentlemen. He began to beat his drum and sing a medicine chant to defuse all the arguing and sparring. He walked up to the large group of whooping young white men and attempted to walk through their midst, still praying. It was a deliberate act of drawing attention to himself and probably seemed very weird to the students, but the thing to do when an elderly man who poses no threat is weirdly banging a drum at you is to move politely out of his way. Many people did move politely out of his way and some did not, and somehow the crowd enveloped him. Then that one smirking (or smiling) young man appeared to fix himself in Philips’s way, or maybe Philips walked up to him, and while he was doing that the Covington students shouted, danced and mocked him for being Native American. That’s what it looks like they’re doing to me. They’re dancing in a way that looks like like fake Native Americans for a moment in one video; I see Tomahawk Chop gestures or what looks like them; I hear them making fake Native American noises. I’ve seen videos turning almost 360 degrees to show that they were completely surrounding Philips and appeared to be hemming him in. So that’s what I believe happened, because it’s what I saw.

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