Every student has the right be safe at school.
Every parent has the right to have their children come home each night.
Don’t back down.
This walkout has one goal: to wake up the conscience of America. Misgivings people hold about calling on high school kids to act can be easily understood: education matters more than protest, a feeling that protests don’t go anywhere, that the problem can’t be solved, that young people might be exposed to danger or exploited.
This reluctance would be enough in ordinary times. But this isn’t that. The so-called greatest nation on earth and leader of the world can’t let its children go to school every day with one eye on the door, afraid that horror will invade their classroom any minute.
The paralysing grip of the NRA around the throat of Congress has made it impossible for even the smallest, most rational changes to be made. A hotel sniper massacres 57 people at a country music festival using a souped up assault weapon. Congress can’t even outlaw bumpstocks, the device that added extra lethality to the rifle. The sickening slaughter of six and seven year olds breaks the heart of anyone who can feel. Congress won’t pass a law requiring background checks for gun buyers that even a majority of NRA members supports.
What will it take to move them? Persistent lobbying by the parents of the dead children at Sandy Hook? That didn’t work. Op-eds, petitions, protests, dedicated work by academics and activists? Congress let the ban on semi-automatic weapons lapse, passed a law making it easier for the mentally ill to get guns and ordered the CDC to stop tracking gun deaths in this country.
That’s why it’s urgent now, when people are shocked and outraged, right now, when the eloquent and righteously angry students of Parkland have the attention of the country, that students walk out of their classrooms and demand change. Their lives are at stake. Don’t tell them to shut up and let the adults handle it. What adults?
Do it now. The next day of school, or the day after that. Support the March for Our Lives on 3/24. But use the momentum you have now. This is too important. Precious lives are at stake. Yours. Out of the classrooms and into the streets.
Students need to stage walkouts as soon as school resumes on Tuesday. Walk out of class for an hour every day until Congress enacts tough gun safety laws. If Congress won’t, walk out for two hours, three hours, four hours, all day, until your demands are met. Don’t wait. Do it now. Seize the momentum, Seize the day.
Published
ugh 