Why I Will March

Around 200 students from South High School went to Minneapolis City Hall to protest recent gun violence and call for gun law reform such as restricting the sale of assault rifles. February 21, 2018. This is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Author: Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA.

Note from Kathie MM: Stay tuned for a new series from our Engaging Peace intern, Sarah Mensch, who intends to be an active supporter of the March for Our Lives movement.

By Sarah Mensch

“…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff… that’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 22

A little over a year ago, I began working with Kathie Malley Morrison exploring the effect of the media on gun violence. During that time, 17 children were shot and killed in school shootings. Since then, 50 more children have been shot and killed at school. Fifteen of them (and two teachers) were victims of the shooting in Parkland.

Students around the nation walked out of their schools in solidarity with the students of MSDHS on March 14, standing outside for 17 minutes in honor of the 17 victims of the shooting. Adults asked their children to “Walk up, not out”— to talk to the student who eats alone, to smile and wave to the “loner kid.” to be so kind to any potential shooters that they do not become  actual shooters. It’s important to encourage children to reach out to each other, and doing so would probably decrease violence, depression, and self-harm. But adults telling children to be kind and not to protest is adults telling children that it’s their job to keep themselves safe during shootings, not adults’ job to keep shootings from happening to them. That’s a mistake.

It’s children’s job to learn how to be good adults. It’s adults’ job to keep children safe. So on Saturday, I will march in The March for Our Lives to take responsibility as an adult, because I will not accept that the government isn’t doing everything they can to disarm harmful people and to protect our children. The numbers over the last few years and especially over the past few months have made it clear that legislators have no intention of making children’s lives safer; between the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 and the five year anniversary of the shooting in 2017, 382 pro-gun bills passed in various states’ legislatures.  The responsibility of keeping our children safe from gun violence has fallen to us, the voters. So, I will march.