“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats it’s children.” – Nelson Mandela.
On Saturday, at 2 p.m., Maria and I will be marching in the March For Our Lives march, we will be on Main Street of or town, Cambridge, N.Y. Many other marches are planned all over the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, Denver, Boston and almost every other city in America.
Maria will be carrying her Crochet Gun sculpture on a post she built during the march. She speaks through her art. i speak through my writing. We will speak together, each in our own ways.
The discussion over guns and gun violence has been shrouded in hatred and argument, and stuck in an awful place. Like the Parkland students who organized this march, I have no interest in banning guns or altering the Second Amendment, I am a gun owner, almost all of my friends have guns, and I refuse to join this in this scripted and paralytic argument. Like the poor soldiers in World War I, we are stuck in our trenches, lobbying empty rhetoric and cant at one another.
Every friend I have here who owns a gun – farmers, hunters, hobbyists, homeowners, Republicans and Democrats – is in favor of some reasonable form of gun control. So do 90 per cent of the American people. Our political leaders are morally bankrupt and seem unable to help.
It is not for me to say what the solution is, it is for us to step behind our frozen ideologies and talk to one another and figure something out.
I do this for my daughter, for my grandchildren, and all the other children in America.
They deserve to be protected. Saturday, they will demand to be protected in a powerful, visible and passionate way. They have broken through, ignored the many vicious attacks on their motives. They are taking charge. All they are asking me to do is contribute, march, sign their petition and vote accordingly. I have done and will do all that.
The marchers will not only be joined by other students, but by the children in Chicago and Baltimore and other cities who have been dying from gun violence for years.
I know I may not be around to see the end of this struggle, but I believe the children will prevail. The future belongs to them, not me. The spirit is with them, destiny is on their side.
The Parkland students have broken through the iron wall, the rhetoric and constipated and predictable argument. They are articulate and passionate and young, they are not easily diverted or dismissed.
They were there, they saw what happened, they lived gun violence and saw their friends bleed and die.
It’s time we do something different, my generation has failed completely to keep our children safe and stem the bloodshed. More than 30,000 people a year die of gunshots in America each year, vastly more casualties than the terrorists have come close to inflicting on us. Almost daily, children are murdered in their schools.
I was a police reporter, in Washington, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and I have seen what bullets to do people, and also to the police officers who patrol the streets. We are a broken society, beyond redemption, if we can’t protect our children and citizens from this slaughter.
This is a crossroads, a turning point for our country. Our children have taken the lead, and I will follow them anywhere they ask me to go. Lots of people in my town are marching in Albany, but Maria and I want to march here, in our town, down Main Street, at 2 p.m. with some of the students at the high school leading the way.
We are not marching for anger, vengeance or argument. We are marching for the lives of the children, and for our brothers and sisters in America, who deserve better than this. Somehow, we have to take back our country, and do our jobs, and stand up for our children.