My Daughter Walked Out. Were you Listening?

Photo Credit: Jack Zellweger (mlive.com)

My daughter walked out yesterday. She walked out of class, down the hallway, and onto the playground. And she stood there for 17 minutes; one minute for each child who was gunned down in a classroom or a hallway in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I’ve read a lot of derogatory remarks directed toward the thousands of children who left their classrooms. They were mostly made by adults; adults who sit with silent resignation each time word of a new mass shooting screams at us from a screen. We, the adults, sworn protectors of our children have shrugged our shoulders for years, have cried along with grieving parents, and then moved on with our lives to wait until the next shots ring out.

The young people in Parkland, Florida, fed up with the inaction of the people who should know better, started a movement. Many dismissed them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t be happier that these young people whose lives have been so terribly disrupted stood up to shout “never again”.

The night before the walkout I asked my daughter if she knew why she was participating. I explained that I didn’t want her to walk if she didn’t know why she was doing it. She was timid at first but then the words tumbled out; words that broke my momma’s heart. She told me that she wants to feel safe in school, that she wants laws to prevent certain people from having access to guns and that she wants assault-type rifles to only belong to military personnel. Until the Parkland shooting, I don’t think it had ever occurred to her to not feel safe in school. She may have heard the words Columbine and Newtown but I don’t believe she associated them with terror or the deaths of children. She is too young to know. The thing is, she’s still too young. My child should not have to walk out of her school to get the attention of lawmakers, to tell them that she doesn’t feel safe. She should not have to know that one month ago 17 children, some only one year older than her, died because they showed up to learn and by some cruel fate, instead, wound up in the path of a bullet.

I didn’t expect that the walkout would change the world by dinnertime. My greatest hope on that day and every day forward is that walking out changed the hearts and minds of the children who stood on playgrounds and parking lots throughout the country. I hope that they witnessed the power of numbers. I hope that they began to understand that it doesn’t always take a blustering voice to bring change; that sometimes change can be carried from one still, small voice to another until a mighty roar emerges from the assembled. This collective voice is, perhaps, the only one that can drown out the rhetoric and the naysayers. I hope that, in those 17 minutes, a new generation of leaders was born; local, state, and national leaders who will one day bring the change that so many of us have longed for.

I hope my daughter learned that leaders aren’t always the people yelling into microphones. I hope she learned that sometimes a leader is the person who says “come walk with me and let’s talk about this problem.” I hope she learned that a leader looks very much like a teacher who is scared too, but comes to the classroom every day because she must teach her children how to think for themselves even when the world around them says that they are too young to understand. I hope she learned that there is power in numbers. I hope she learned that you don’t have to know everything about a problem to understand that it is a problem. I hope she learned that there are often many different ways to solve a problem. I hope she learned that it’s possible to be both small and fierce. I hope she learned that adults don’t always have the answers and that, if we are smart, we will look to her generation for help in making changes. I hope she learned that we are listening. I hope that we are. Are you?