Children's crusade

It's the kids who point the way. They almost always do.

Fifty years and more ago they sat at lunch counters and rode buses and went door-to-door in America's apartheid districts, where people of color lived in third-world poverty and the simple American act of registering voters could buy you an unmarked grave in an earthen dam. The civil rights movement was a long and bloody fight, and if it was Martin Luther King Jr. who was its public face, it was the kids who were its engine. They were the shock troops who drove it; they were the agents who finally effected the change the politicians would not.

It's the kids who point the way.

And so, over the weekend, on behalf of another cause, here were Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs and Jeanie Buss of the Lakers and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash and basketball Hall of Famer Bill Russell, marching or encouraging others to march. Here were almost a million people  in the streets of Washington D.C. over the weekend, evoking images of the March for Freedom in 1963 and  MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In dozens of other cities all over the nation, people marched, speechified, demanded action. America is tired of living in an armed camp, and they let the gun-lobby toadies in Congress know it. And it was the kids who made it happen.

The kids from Parkland, scarred by yet another schoolhouse slaughter and damn fed up with it. Kids from communities all over the nation, including my own kid in my own hometown. They have been called naïve and stupid and unqualified to speak on weighty constitutional matters such as the rights of gun owners. Their leaders have been viciously smeared by ignorant political thugs, a distasteful display of alleged grownups picking on children. And the chief lobbying arm of the gun industry, the NRA, has accused them of being the pawns of unnamed shadowy forces committed to dismantling the Second Amendment.

And it all sounds astoundingly familiar.

For the last couple of weeks, you see, the book on the Blob's nightstand has been Bruce Watson's
"Freedom Summer," a chronicle of the dark summer of 1964 in Mississippi. It was a seminal turning point in the civil rights struggle, and it was the kids who led it. Idealistic college students joined forces with courageous local African-Americans that summer to register voters, build "Freedom Schools" and otherwise try to bring some measure of light to the darkest of those aforementioned apartheid districts. They were beaten and terrorized and three of them were killed for their trouble.

None of the latter is happening to the kids of 2018, of course. But reading "Freedom Summer" has been like a psychic echo, because the pushback they're getting sounds very much like the pushback the kids of Freedom Summer got: They're naïve, they don't understand, they're pawns, and so on and so on.

And yet, like the kids of the civil rights movement, they're the ones who have finally put the fear of God in the toadies. The Republican-dominated legislature in Florida pushed through new gun legislation in what seemed the blink of an eye, and Gov. Rick Scott -- a reactionary right-winger -- signed it into law. Even President Trump, himself an NRA fellow traveler, has been moved to advocate new gun legislation.

The message: In the face of passionate idealism, the forces of inertia and cynicism and entrenched quid pro quo have no effective response. All they can do is spit back the same old tired lines they've been fed by their benefactors, which sound older and more tired with every reciting. Or they become children themselves and resort to playground taunts.

I don't know much. But I do know that, after Columbine and Newtown and Aurora and Las Vegas and a dozen other slaughters, it's the kids who finally got the people who run things in this country to listen, albeit grudgingly. It's the kids, and their facility with social media to command the narrative, who galvanized the rest of us to finally shout loud enough to be heard over the lobbyists and their fistfuls of cash.

The rest of us being men and women of all ages and walks of life. The rest of us being gun owners and hunters and veterans of every stripe and rank who know the damage military-grade weapons can do to human beings, and who are horrified at how easily accessible they are to the untrained and  unbalanced. And, yes, the rest of us being athletes who seem to have rediscovered a social conscience -- and whose influence is far greater now because they represent both a multi-billion dollar industry, and a part of the American social fabric that has become all-pervasive.

Gun ownership is an American right and should remain so, the vast majority of these people believe. But they also believe the Second Amendment has been warped so completely out of round it would today be unrecognizable to its authors. And, as a result, America has become a nation not just of gun owners but gun fetishists, fed by the paranoid ravings of a gun lobby whose goal is to scare more Americans into buying more guns.

The consequence of all this, we see almost every other week now to one degree or another.

The good news is, so do the kids.