I can only guess at the pain that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students from Parkland, Fla., feel as they watch their elders dither over gun control. These are the results you get from us – hypocrisy and betrayal. The students’ adversaries are monumental. Its structure will have to be dismantled brick by brick.
I imagine what would have happened if a gunman had entered my Florida school 50 years ago and murdered 17 of my classmates and teachers.
The year, 1968. The school, Father Lopez Catholic High School in Daytona Beach. We 17-year-old juniors have Valentine’s Day on our minds. I hoped I had bought just the right thing for my girlfriend. My girlfriend might have been contemplating the very same thing. Basketball season was winding down and it looked like my Green Wave team was going to win the conference. We had all given up something for Lent. Chocolate. French fries. Cussing. Fear of eternal damnation kept us chaste so there was no reason to give up sex, although we joked about it. Spring break was on the horizon, as was summer, and we were thinking about summer jobs and days on the beach.
We
had an open campus. Anyone could walk in and did. Moms delivered forgotten
lunches and homework. Visitors dropped by at any time. We would have been
sitting ducks for a killer.
It
never happened at my school and never has. If 17 of my
classmates had been killed, I would have known them all – we had fewer than 400
students in four grades. One of the dead or wounded could have been me. I like
to think that I would have been a hero no matter what. I have nothing to base
that on because I had never faced a shot fired in anger – and I still haven’t.
We would all be devastated. We would be looking for solace and answers.
What
would adults have told us? Don’t worry. This is an aberration. The gunman was
crazy. It will never happen again.
And
we would have believed them.
That
was our first mistake. It wouldn’t be our last.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be gunned down in Memphis. Our
school’s mostly-black neighborhood would not be safe. Riots would erupt on
Second Avenue which, during those segregated times, was where the black
population lived.
On June 6, Robert Kennedy would be murdered by an assassin. I idolized the
Kennedys. RFK and JFK were imperfect human beings. But I was a teen looking for some heroes.
Florida
native Charles Whitman murdered 16 people, most of them from a perch at the
University of Texas tower, in July 1966. Not the first mass murder but the fact
that it was a former Marine sniper made news. And he was a very angry white
man.
On
Valentine’s Day 1968, the Tet Offensive was just winding down in Vietnam. Surely
this meant the end of a failed experiment, one that was claiming the lives of my
peers and many Vietnamese. The war dragged on for another seven years. Our elders,
“the best and the brightest,” insisted it was the right thing to do.
None
of the adults gave us the real facts about sex. Parents and nuns and priests
decided that fear was enough of a deterrent. They were mostly correct, although
at least one of our female classmates missed part of the senior year with an
unplanned pregnancy. You would not be surprised that pregnant teens found the
same censure at public schools. It just wasn’t done. The boys were never
blamed.
We
knew betrayal, we didn’t yet have a name for it. Members of our generation possessed
a simmering rage. That was a problem, because the Summer of Love and the Age of
Aquarius had dawned. Peace, love, and understanding. If that was true, how come
people were filled with anger? Blacks vs. Whites. Cops vs. pot smokers. Rednecks
vs. hippies. Viet Cong vs. the U.S.A. Irish Catholics vs. Protestants. Jews vs.
Arabs and almost everyone else.
Flash
forward to the present. Seventeen killed and a dozen wounded at a Florida high
school. The only ones making sense are 16- and 17-year-old classmates of the
dead at Douglas High School. Adults in positions of power are dangerous fools.
They spout nonsense that get their children killed.
Betrayed.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
It
may have its roots in the betrayal that ignited our generation. That was never
resolved, or forgotten, just buried as the years passed. We weren’t the first. It’s possible
that adults of every generation betray their children. Over time, we lose touch
with our values and our kids pay the price. You can say that every generation
needs to experience hardships to find out the true nature of the world. Center
for Disease Control figures come up with 1.55 million deaths from firearms in
the U.S. from 1968-2016. This includes the span of many generations. Wouldn’t a
smart, caring community have come up with some solutions by now?
Good
people do bad things. Bad people do bad things. That’s an old story. But why do
we make it easier for anyone to buy an AR-15, walk into a school, and shoot
down 17 people? Haven’t we learned our lessons by now? Columbine, Aurora,
Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas. The list goes on and on. If we don’t do
something about it, we betray our children. If we do something about it, we
betray only the NRA and our thick-headed politicians.
The
choice should be clear. More betrayal, the generational rite of passage? Or do we
do something new and different and constructive?
Which
will it be?
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