The "MARCH FOR OUR LIVES DAY" Story

It was an ordinary day.  A "MARCH FOR OUR LIVES DAY".  Kids a quarter of my age organized the march, and boy did they do a fantastic job!  I listened to what they had to say in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and all over the world.  Kids who are tired of being scared to go to school. Carol and I recently visited with out daughter and her family in Urbana, Maryland, a small bedroom community outside Washington D.C.  Our oldest granddaughter, Courtney, told us how scared she is to go to school.  And, I believed her since I could see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice!!  She said kids talk about guns all the time.  A student in nearby Solanco High School, to the south of Lancaster, told the Lancaster Newspaper that they have "active shooter drills" as part of their school day.  Unbelievable!!  I can remember when I was a high school student and we had "active atomic bomb" drills, but with a much different meaning.  I grew up during the cold war era and we were always afraid that Russia was going to bomb us.  Our new high school which opened in 1958 had a section of the building that was totally underground with extremely thick walls to keep us away from the radioactivity that would be created from the bombs.  We practiced marching silently single file from our classrooms to the area near the locker rooms and sat on the floor with our heads between our knees until we got the all-clear signal.  We were never told if it was real or not, but I can remember being scared and wondered why my fellow classmates took so long to walk down the stairs to the bomb shelter.  My aunt and uncle built a bomb shelter in their basement and kept it filled with non-perishable food and bottles of drinking water.  They too were afraid of what might happen if we were bombed by Russia.  Time passed and nothing ever came from it, but that's not the case for our younger generation.  Seems like almost every week someone starts to shoot up a school somewhere killing people.  The common denominator today seems to be a deranged young man with an automatic weapon.  What's an easy way to calm the younger generation?  Take away the murder weapon and treat the mentally ill young man.  Not easy to do since there are so many automatic weapons in existence today which seem to find their way into the hands of those who have a grudge against society.  But, this younger generation is sick of it and are willing to do something about it.  Many students from various school districts in the Lancaster area boarded buses yesterday to participate in "MARCH FOR OR LIVES DAY" yesterday in Washington D.C.  I watched it on TV and found the most stirring speaker was a young woman from Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida where the most recent mass murder had occurred.  Young lady by the name of Emma Gonzalez, a senior at the Florida high school, who made a call to action by the youth of today.  She said, "We call BS! to leaders who thing kids don't know anything and new laws won't work."  As she stood on stage she became silent, with tears flowing down her face.  The crowd also became silent, with most people crying.  I must tell you that Carol and I also had tears flowing at the same time.  She stood at the podium, silent for 4 minutes and 25 seconds then told the crowd to "Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job."  I found out later she timed her speech to last 6 minutes and 20 seconds, the exact time the gunman spent shooting up her classmates.  The Lancaster Newspaper reported that a young girl from Lancaster shouted to her, "We love you!" while waving a sign which read, "They tried to bury us.  They didn't know we were seeds."  I'm convinced that these young people who formed this march today, who will be national leaders in our government in the near future, will get their gun reform they deserve sooner than later.  Just a simple ban on automatic weapons and mental health reform is all they want.  If it helps eliminate the death count, how can anyone disagree?  It has nothing to do with our Second Amendment and everything to do with the wealth of the NRA and those who take their donations!  You'll never convince me that isn't the case!  I'm hoping the youth who formed the rally will see their hard fought battle come to fruition in a timely manner. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.