I Must Protest! From the Editor's Desk...

Since its inception one tenet of The Ripple's loosely structured mission statement was to avoid topics political. Some readers might think this post hypocritical

in that respect. However, I prefer to view the following post as a health issue subject because it addresses the health of all Americans, in particular our country's school children .

I grew up in the 1960s, a decade of social turmoil that was an amalgam of burgeoning civil rights movements, the war in Vietnam, and a counter-culture whose anti-establishment mantra was "Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out." The conflict in Vietnam was insidious, an all consuming cancer at all levels of American life. Our evening meals were spent watching news feeds from the killing fields: napalm fireballs, helicopter gunships, fire fights, medics treating blood soaked wounded, blood soaked themselves, flagged draped caskets. Casualties mounted; the daily "body count" became as routine as today's stock market report. Enemy soldiers were shot and killed before our very eyes...before we had dessert. In May of 1968 I followed a U.S. Army bus for miles to my hometown, unaware the entire time it was carrying the burial detail for my twenty-year old brother-in-law who did not survive the Tet Offensive.

Yet I never participated in a single protest march. I never joined peers who laid their bodies on freeways, splayed out, snarling traffic. Never once did I think about joining the radical groups that commandeered campus buildings; blowing up buildings was the farthest thing from my mind. I never marched; never carried a sign. I still have my draft card. The first year I taught, four college students were shot and killed on the campus of Kent State U, their lives taken by young Americans much like themselves. The difference being one side wore National Guard uniforms and carried rifles loaded with live ammunition while the other was armed only with words and perhaps a few rocks. You might say I was in survival mode of another kind in those days, studying to pass the next midterm or final exam, struggling to buy groceries, pay the next rent bill or quarter's tuition. During those years of fury and ferment my only protest was against a landlady who refused to fix the leak in our apartment roof.

For thirty-one years I taught in the state's public schools. Toward the end of my career I became aware of  unsettling changes nationwide, especially those that spilled over into my line of work. There was the bomb threat that shut down my high school for a day.

Then a couple of lock downs which, thank god, proved false alarms. Unbeknownst to me a student in one of my classes had a loaded handgun in his backpack.

Fortunately the handgun was later discovered and the student subsequently suspended...a loaded gun concealed in a backpack in my classroom for an entire period. Sometime later a student holding a handgun threatened a colleague in the school parking lot. And a former student was gunned down in Colorado, shot to death in a dispute over a parking space. One year before I retired, the Columbine High shooting occurred, the first high school mass shooting in the Nation's history. For the first time in my career I felt a twinge of fear when a colleague warned me a student whom I had reprimanded in class said that I "...had better watch out." As retirement approached, I told people half jokingly: "I hope I get my gold watch before I get a lead slug."

And then the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School. School children, many of who had yet to lose their baby teeth, massacred in the sanctity of a public school classroom. This is inexcusable, I thought. These were children. But nothing was done. Those who had the power to do something...anything...those who most certainly had children of their own, any of who, but for good fortune, might have been in a similar elementary school classroom, turned a blind eye to the carnage, the blood, the loss of young lives, the future of our country. And on and on it continued....

And continues yet today. And so I decided to attend my first protest, the March for Our Lives event held over the weekend in Seattle.

I hand printed a sign and joined my daughter and thousands of others who marched nearly two miles ("plodded,"in my case) in support of kids at risk from gun violence. I didn't chant. I didn't cheer. I didn't sing. I held my sign high and let it speak my message. I marched for some sanity in a Nation fraught with gun violence. I marched for its victims and those yet to become victims. I marched for the students I had taught, thankful they never had to flee their classrooms in terror, leaving dead classmates and teachers behind. I marched so the message raised by today's youth will continue to resonate. I marched for them in the hope they effect commonsense change. I marched for the young boy holding a sign that said: "When I grow up, I hope to be alive...."

Print this post