Marching to Save Their Lives and Ours

When I was in fifth grade we had air raid drills that always ended in the school basement. Surrounded by raw brick walls and crouched under a dark jumble of pipes and cables, I felt more unsafe there than I imagined I would in an upstairs classroom. We were warned, as if told like a ghost story, that when the bomb exploded directly over us we would all be instantly vaporized. Some of us giggled. No one, other than the stern-faced teachers, was afraid.Kids don’t cry. Until they are hit.In the Italian film, Life is Beautiful, a boy and his parents were deported during the Nazi occupation to Auschwitz but the father ingeniously (and ingenuously) turned the entire terrible experience into a benign game of pretend and persevere. The boy was shielded from all sense of horror and ultimately escaped the camp without any of the trauma (and death) visited upon millions of camp deportees. By evoking that parental shield the father managed to protect his son from the terrors the elders faced and endured.In today’s increasingly chaotic and rapidly devolving world, people keep asking themselves and posing this question in print and online: what do we tell our children?It’s as if we cannot readily manage the uncertainties swirling into fear, anxiety and mounting turmoil and tumult. We displace the fear, project the disquieting realities, onto the faces of our children. How do we protect them from what we cannot protect ourselves from? By putting our children’s hands into the many pockets of our distress and alarm? Worry more about them, worry less about ourselves? Projection and denial are fundamental psychological defense mechanisms, universal and inalienable. And they work, though only temporizingly and falsely.My older son, usually our familial doomsayer, proposes a brighter vision for the future than present times would suggest. Remember the 1920s, he would say, when wealth migrated to the few elite while the greater numbers of working poor suffered and struggled with no societal support and with little redress. Then came the Great Depression and a social revolution ensued bringing a whole new American concept of social services—the creation of welfare, social security, standard working hours, child labor laws, and the beginning movement toward Medicare..

"Children do not gladly inherit the sins of their fathers."

.Great human suffering has historically often resulted in major social advancements: The civil rights movement was a response to systematized and brutal racial injustice and it spawned great leaders and the concept of expanding civil liberties; the advent in the late nineteenth century of psychology as a science dissolved notions of inequality between male and female mental function and advanced the wildly progressive concept of the modern woman; the American war of independence, spurned by empiric domination, produced the new democratic ideal of universal equality, soon matched by the French Revolution.Today we are witnessing the rise of oligarchic politics, the resurgence of oppression against newly recognized (as well as long identified) minorities, the continuing subjugation and objectification of women, the gross denial of stark realities such as global warming, and the malevolent bifurcation of wealth and power between social classes. This onrushing crisis, this drive toward a social apocalypse, is likely to promulgate a new social revolution with radically benevolent political, social and economic policies yet to be imagined.Isn’t that the anodyne to feed our children, they who will pull those future ramparts? Our children will have witnessed our struggle, lived past it, and will take up political and social arms against it.Children do not gladly inherit the sins of their fathers. They fight to correct them, to redeem them and to create a better place for their own children.Many of us are in agony as we see our world floundering in a sea of gross improprieties, mass mendacities, and the reeling spector of more wars. We tremble at the coming Armageddon. And well we might.Our weary, weakened flame has already begun to be passed on. Witness the March for Our Lives nation-wide demonstration—a stunning reminder of American exceptionalism put back in force. This is a cause initiated by teenagers many not yet old enough to vote. They have pushed the entire country on a march to outlaw assault weapons.It is these children who have already answered the question we fear would go unanswered.These are the children who will save us all.