It was once said, “If a tree falls in the forest, you’ll get three stories: yours, mine and the tree’s.”
On March 14 the national student protest #walkout led many students to protest outside their schools, remembering the tragic deaths of 17 students in Florida’s school shooting last month.
The media presented two stories. In one story, students are held together, marching in solidarity to bring awareness to the violence of school shootings, the first fruits of a new voice echoing into the political theater. In the other story, students were unleashed into the community, vandalizing and being arrested by law enforcement.
Only recently has a third story surfaced—a darker story that has led a non-participating student to suspension and a questioning public school teacher to administrative probation. Overnight, radical political activists turned our public schools into the new political frontier, turning students into child soldiers.
#WALKOUT ORGANIZERS ORGANIZED #WOMANSMARCH
The #walkout was rumored to have been spearheaded by high school students who oppose gun violence in schools and are in mourning for those killed in the Parkland shooting. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the same massive political activist conglomerate which brought January 2017’s #WomansMarch, brought about #WalkOut through its youth program, EMPOWER. This conglomerate touts leadership from Linda Sarsour, who has ties to the Nation of Islam and garnishes support from Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, MoveOn.org and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Each of these organizations has less to do with responding to gun violence than creating entrenched, nation-wide political activists.
The concern is not whether these organizations have a right to create activists, but if these organizations should be allowed to draft our youth. It is not a question about how agreeable, different, radical or devastating their political views may be. Rather, it is a question about if children should have to contend against ideologues in the halls of their most elementary education. Whether you support these organizations, the doors will swing both ways and the political floodwaters will drown youthful minds.
FUTURE CHILD SOLDIERS
The concern for politicizing our education system is no longer a hypothetical, but now an active contest. Public schools were too swift to support a massive political activist conglomeration. Parents were too swift to write-off the national protest as untethered voices of a new generation. Politicians were too swift to open their arms and embrace our youth. History has already testified to the dangers of throwing children into the political grinding wheel. In the wake of the #walkout protests, nothing new has emerged except now in America children are again no longer safe from becoming targets for political activists.
