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New Founding Fathers?


Since America’s inception protesting has been a huge part of bringing about necessary changes to our countries laws. From the Boston Tea Party to the brave sit-ins conducted by brave college students in the 1960’s protesting has been the means of bringing about great and very necessary change. Each of these protests were conducted by educated men and women who knew that change needed to take place and were willing to put their lives on the line to enact that change.

This past Wednesday high school students across the globe walked out of their schools in order to protest “violence in schools”. Many have called these students brave, heroic and modern day founding fathers.
When did it become heroic to skip 17 minutes of class and demand the confiscation of “military-style weapons” (what are those by the way?) as Ara Omotowa from Hillcrest High School did? When did it become brave to join other students your age and wander out to the quad and then return back to class? When did skipping school become the equivalent of being a traitor to the crown knowing that if you were caught you would be drawn and quartered, with your entrails fed to the dogs while your family was left fatherless?
Was it brave because they all got tardy slips for their next class? Tardy slips that according to District 93 spokesman Phil Campbell, can be excused by their parents. If that’s bravery then I guess every time I snuck out of school during an assembly I was brave too. Was it brave because there was a chance of being arrested as with the sit-in protests in the 1960’s? It couldn’t have been that because none of the students left the campus, so they weren’t even risking truancy. Was it brave because they faced social ostracization from their peers? Nope. In the social media age, those who stayed inside are much more likely to be ostracized than those that chose to walk out.

The next question we need to ask ourselves is why these students are protesting. They say they are protesting violence in our schools which is something that needs to be looked at, however, how many of these students actually know what the gun laws are in Idaho or the Nation? Do they know the numbers of gun deaths each year? Have they studied what caliber of gun they want banned or are they just crying out for non-specific “gun laws”? Have they studied the effects of gun laws in big cities like New York and Chicago versus lax cities in Idaho and Arkansas? Do they really have an agenda or was this their chance to miss class and hang out together?
Protests are an amazing way to bring awareness to an issue. Used properly and done respectfully they can move mountains. Used improperly and praised undeservedly they lessen the impact that past and future protests can have on generations to come. If we hold these students up as icons next to the founding fathers and other great protesters, it lessens the victories of the latter group into nothing. It lessens what they risked, what they were willing to go through to get change.

We do need to make our schools safer, and there are many ways to do that. Having students leave class to “make a point” is not one of them.

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