The children will lead us — to sanity
COAST-TO-COAST ANGER
By the thousands, the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands, they flooded into the streets. In small towns, suburbs, cities, the nation’s capital.
The message was pure: We do not have to live this way any longer. We do not have to live under the gun, terrorized by weapons designed for war that are now in civilian hands across the land. We refuse. It was children who led the way — children who are simultaneously wise beyond their years and who wield a youthful moral force that the rest of us, jaded by too many years of inaction, should envy and strive to emulate.
Imagine a 14-year-old girl, born in 2004. She likes sleepovers. She reads teen mysteries. She goes to the mall.
When she was 3, a young man with semiautomatic pistols killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.
When she was 5, a man with semiautomatic pistols killed 13 people in Binghamton, N.Y. Another man killed 13 people on the Fort Hood military base in Texas.
When she was 8, a young man with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Connecticut.
When she was 12, a man with a semiautomatic rifle killed 49 clubgoers in Orlando.
When she was 13, a man with semiautomatic rifles rigged to be fully automatic killing machines murdered 58 people at a concert in Las Vegas. And another man with a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people in a Texas church.
When she was 14, a young man just five years older than her killed 14 children and three adults in a South Florida high school.
Like the boys and girls she marched with today, this pounding, this terrible deadening drumbeat of death and the creeping powerlessness and rage and fear that come with it, have made her age before her time. A child should not have to see such things. She has seen them. Her friends have seen them.
A child should not have to wake herself from nightmares of hiding in closets from men with guns. She has. Her friends have.
A child should not have to have her school day interrupted by active-shooter drills. She has. Her friends have.
But that premature life wisdom coexists with energy and optimism, the great gifts of youth.
And so this girl and her friends, and her brother and his friends, and a generation of youngsters arrayed across the nation, do not accept that this world they have known must be the world they grow into.
The old excuses don’t work on them. The that’s-just-the-way-itis eye rolls of supposedly smart people, who want to change things but have lost the will to fight, make no sense to them. The mindless, fully automatic mantras of National Rifle Association spokespeople may as well be gibberish.
These boys and these girls see clearly what too many men and women have ceased to see.
They know they can shape something better, a nation in which the fear of firearms no longer haunts us. Where the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects the right to own and carry a weapon, subject to sane limits, is not a suicide pact.
These young people know that through force of will, they can demand a country in which finally, finally the answer to guns is not more and more and more guns, but limitations that intelligent and humane people know are necessary.
No more weapons of war. No more endless streams of ammo. No more trigger-happy culture that reveres the handling of cold metal machines designed to wound and kill.
They marched for their lives. They marched for our nation.