Sensory story from the first essay

The president of my school’s GSA was my best friend, and under her leadership they combated the “don’t say gay bill” and raised a ton of money for a local support group that helped GLBT teens. We had one of the most active and effective GSA’s in the country, and the Westboro Baptist Church had been targeting us for a while for a visit. we first got word of their plan through a flier that they sent out in a press release.  I have a screenshot of the flier here:

The whole thing was a fiasco. The primary goal the school had was to make sure no one did anything stupid. The WBC are all smart, and several have gone to law school, so anything that a student did would be held against them. In fact, how the WBC gets a ton of it’s funding is through lawsuits. My school repeatedly put out notices that this would be a peaceful counter-protest and that any students who acted out would be suspended.  Our GSA contacted the Human Rights Campaign, the main group fighting homophobic legislation, and the HRC gave us over five thousand dollars of free merchandise to sell to raise funds in the coming week before the protest. Our GSA set up a table in the lunchroom and sold shirts and bracelets every period, every day. Practically every single student in the entire school had some form of acceptance printed on their persons.

The WBC had contacted the local police department prior to their arrival, and the Clayton PD had agreed to set up a barricade on the school side, and a two hundred foot “neutral zone” in between us, and the ten by ten space that was allotted for the WBC. It was a bitterly cold day, and there was so much of a traffic backup that I walked to school that day, two hours early so I could catch the protest that was scheduled to be before school, so that students could still focus on academia afterwards (as if that would ever happen anyway). When I arrived, the amount of news vans on the street was ridiculous. Every conceivable radio and TV station from the state (and in some cases, bi-state area) had shown up to cover the protest and counter-protest. My friend and president of the GSA had set up a very large donation collection area, where people would donate to fund local pro-LGBT organizations. To paraphrase on the press release she gave the news stations, the WBC’s hate would bite them in their own asses.

When the WBC finally arrived, there were over 700 people massed into our zone (almost 80% of the student body!). Most people came to show their support, and some people made signs. The beautiful thing was, that none of these signs were negative, all were messages of love, and of tolerance. We had hundreds of people from other schools and from around the metropolitan area come and show their support for our school, our GSA, and our message of tolerance and acceptance. By the end of the day when the WBC finally left, we had raised a great sum of money to support those being oppressed by people like the WBC. I personally think that it was a wonderful day that really brought our school together in a way that I’d never seen in my four years there.