To America's Young People: Hold High The Torch

In a weird twist on an old science-fiction and physics conundrum—that is, you cannot go back in time and kill your grandfather, or, if you do go back in time and kill someone like Hitler when he was a boy, the future world will likely change in very unforeseen ways—the dastardly plans and unanticipated consequences of fictional time voyagers have been carried out in our schools without the need for time travel at all. The present-day assassins who have, since 1999, killed 149 students and teachers may well have taken the lives of the next Mozart, the next Einstein, the next Picasso, the next Steinbeck, the next Lincoln. [I know there are many more, depending on how one chooses and ranks the statistics—I have chosen what I believe are the major incidents, but my argument extends to all]

Who can say that among these too-soon-extinguished lives was not a Nobel Peace Prize winner; a discoverer of a cure for glaucoma, or diabetes, or Alzheimer’s, or cancer; an inventor of a source of truly clean-energy; a diplomat whose skills united a divided Middle East or stabilized the Korean Peninsula; the first woman to set foot on Mars; the first person to detect the signal from space that tells us we are not alone in the universe. The adults who died were not finished with their lives’ work of molding and inspiring their students—what more work could they have done? The killers who rampaged through those schools denied 149 children, teenagers, young adults and their teachers, coaches, and mentors, the chance to do any of those great things for humanity.   

·        But now let’s take a look at who the shooters did not kill. They did not kill tens of millions of young people between the ages of 15 and 25. They did not kill the balance of the students, for example, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. They did not kill some of the nation’s most promising leaders, doctors, scientists, inventors, writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, teachers, mothers- and fathers-to-be. And, most importantly—at least it should be of prime importance to the men and women in Congress and in the White House today—they did not kill tens of millions of young people who are now mobilizing as never before to wrest unseemly power away from the established government and replace it with leaders of conscience and substance.

There are tipping points that move entire nations to act, and I believe America has reached such a tipping point, though at the heavy cost of young lives, and the forever burdens resting on their families’ hearts. How do we as a nation come to terms with such sadness and longing for an answer? How do we identify and act on this new tipping point? Perhaps we can find some direction in the words of a 103-year-old poem, written in the middle of another great crisis in which young people were dying.

In 1915, during World War I, at the Second Battle of Ypres, Major John McCrea, a Canadian military doctor and artillery commander, was so struck by the battlefield death of a friend of his, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, that he penned the words to a poem that has come to symbolize all the frustration, sorrow, and pointlessness of war.  McCrea wrote,

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

McCrea was issuing a challenge to the living who were enduring the horrors of that war—and future wars. The words, “To you from failing hands we throw the torch…be  yours to hold high…” spoken from the graves of the fallen to the hearts of the living, urged an end to the ferocity and atrocity of war as a compact of faith between those who died and those who survived.

Far more than 149 students and teachers rest uneasily in too many hushed and grass-enfolded versions of Flanders’ Fields all across our nation. I write the word “uneasily” because their deaths have not yet been paid for, have not yet been addressed to society’s satisfaction, and until our society finds a way to bring an end to this unholy war that is killing our children and their teachers and demoralizing our communities, the dead cannot rest easily. Nor, for that fact, should any American—or any politician—rest easily in the comforts of their homes until we have brought gun deaths to bay and eliminated the root causes of such violence against humanity.

It is my belief that the young men and women we have seen on television and across social media—the well-spoken, thoughtful, and properly-angry students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and their student peers nationwide—are in a perfect position, by dint of their age, energy, and their passion, to transform America’s political landscape. It is to them that the torch has been thrown; it is to them the up and coming generations of Americans will look for leadership and fundamental change in Washington and in every governor’s mansion, state legislature, and city council.

Such change will take time, but time is what the nation’s teenagers and young adults have and that my generation does not. The movement by young people to take America in a new direction, a course away from death-by-gunfire and toward life-without-fear, must either be supported by those who hold office, or relinquished to younger, more capable hands. Either way, tomorrow’s America, an America unafraid of gun violence, is going to be shaped by a new and determined generation whose power at the polls, and whose aspirations to run for office, will reset our path, and reclaim our nation.