When kids become pawns

I’m not a big fan of agitprop. Those showy protests where people stand around with tape across their mouth to show that they’ve been “silenced,” or those deliberately melodramatic episodes where people lie down across major intersections to show they’ve been figuratively killed (and in the process, murder our evening commutes home), or those parades where pink crochet hats represent liberated genitalia bouncing around on liberated female heads, are really nothing more than annoying attempts to scream, “Look at me!”

But even worse than the displays of the uber-evolved progressives (let’s call them UEPs) who continue to assault us weekly with their displeasure about the status quo is the attempt, by these UEPs, to enlist schoolchildren in their varied crusades.

We saw children being deployed in the health care debates, including one little boy whose mother died and who was stationed next to President Obama as he signed the Affordable Care Act into law, prompting us to believe that if the mean conservatives hadn’t prevented his mother from having health insurance, she would have survived.

Children have been used in immigration protests, in Planned Parenthood crusades (and to be fair, in pro-life marches,) and in political campaigns.

And now, children are being mined for their emotional impact in the gun debate. After my piece entitled “Teens are dupes for anti-gun politics”, I received lot of negative blowback from people like Tom from East Norriton, who wrote: “The most appalling words you have ever written are ‘The young people who are standing in front of the cameras and condemning our gun-loving society are appropriating the tragedy of their classmates for political goals.”

This week, students across the country and in our own backyard will be staging a walkout. Some schools will have their students leave the building for 17 minutes, to mark each of the 17 lives lost in the Parkland massacre.

Others will have the students attend assemblies where there will be 17 minutes of silence, to symbolize the same thing. Others still will close down the school altogether.

Those who don’t want to participate are able to opt out, which means they will either ignore the maelstrom around them.

That is going to be very hard, because if the default position is “we will walk out of school in protest and show how we care about the lives of our friends,” not walking out with them is an implicit “we don’t care.”

And that’s wrong, and that’s one of the reasons I have a big problem with this protest. It puts the burden on kids who might not want to be used as pawns in a larger agenda to explain why they “don’t care.”

Which is really a heavy load to place on anyone’s shoulders, let alone a middle or high schooler.

I also have a big problem using the symbolism of abandoning a school to prove how evolved and caring we are about students. The argument that, well, schools are unsafe and so it makes sense to walk out of them in symbolic protest falls flat. If these kids are walking out of school, what are they walking toward?

Wouldn’t it be better to have those moments of silence at the desk, and then engage in debates in the classroom about gun safety, or have mock legislative sessions, or write letters to the congressman who have let the students down?

I know that’s not as sexy and dramatic and eye-catching, and I know that won’t give the newscasters a shot at stratospheric ratings, but it would be more substantive and effective.

But the thing that angers me the most about this whole protest is not its form, or its substance, but its backstory. My good friend Craig Williams discussed this with me on my radio show last Sunday.

During the podcast, Craig revealed something that I hadn’t known, and that is the role that the Women’s March organizers were playing in putting this protest together.

I asked Craig, who is much better at distilling the fundamental problem with this protest than I am, to weigh in. Here is some of what he had to say:

“The Women’s March should not be used by progressive parents and school administrators acting through the children to thought-shame or value-shame or conservative-shame a vast group in our community who disagree with the Women’s March on every issue.

“That is political thought-bullying and condescension which polarizes civil discourse ab initio … it is a shame; this could be a powerful moment if done a different day, apart from political opportunism.”

I couldn’t say it any better.