A Voice from a Crowd

Comrade Young manages to confuse Wright’s entire Communist literary club about the intentions of Comrade Swann. It’s later discovered that Young had escaped from an insane asylum. If one madman can almost convince a Communist club to release one of its prominent members, one voice can certainly move a crowd to action. This voice must be loud and relentless, but it can be done. I recently saw the movie “Milk,” a film that depicts the life of Harvey Milk. Milk was a San Francisco-based gay rights leader who, in the 1970s, fought laws that sought to diminish the rights of gays. The movie focuses some attention on Anita Bryant, a Christian woman who, in 1977, wanted to repeal a Dade County, Florida ordinance that illegalized discrimination against gays. She thought that the ordinance encouraged “the gay agenda.” People throughout the United States followed the repeal process closely, some praying it would be repelled, some fervently hoping it wouldn’t. The ordinance was repelled in 1977, leading to mass outrage. In San Francisco, gay men and women took to the streets. A riot seemed imminent, and so Harvey Milk was called to calm them. Milk stood in front of hundreds of angry men and women and asked them to march with him through the streets to protest the repeal. His one voice quenched their thoughts of violence. The group marched for miles, and no rioting occurred in San Francisco. A megaphone amplified Milk’s voice, and faulty facts backed Young’s crusade against Swann, but both men, fortified by either good intentions or bad ones, managed to voice their opinion to a crowd and created change.