Will we follow our children's lead?

And the children led. And our elders met them on Morris Street.

That’s not breaking news. It is yesterday’s news, news from Wednesday, March 14. If you have a middle schooler or teen in the La Conner schools, your child told you this news. For everyone else, who wasn’t on Morris Street Wednesday, you just read the lead of next week’s front-page story. Students with signs marched from the high school to Morris Street. Rumor has it that elders from the Retirement Inn met them. I hope that became true.

March 14 is the one-month anniversary of the Parkland, Florida school shootings. Students all over the country walked out of their schools. Students from all over the country, their parents, families and friends will gather with others in Washington, D.C. for this “for kids and by kids” rally March 24. There will be “sibling” marches across the country, including Seattle.

This editorial is about guns, of course, and also free speech: the right to peacefully assemble. Our children are marching into democracy, for when they assemble, they bring the most important issues in their hearts and on their minds into the community square.

And when the children lead us, we integrate these social dynamics into a request that they be heard and their future considered. It is best that we stop and pay attention.

How sad it is that in the assembling is the plea “We just want to be safe. We just want to graduate. We just want to grow up. We just want to live.”

And how sad it is that even in little, out of the way La Conner we cannot guarantee their safety.

The first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York was in 1848. Not until 1920, 72 years later, did they win the right to vote. Africans were brought to these shores as slaves in 1619. Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did Blacks gain full citizenship rights. That took 346 years.

There are close to 400 million guns in private hands in the U.S. It will take decades, and a host of miracles, to bulldoze all those guns into oblivion.

How many more children will we mourn and bury until we choose life over death?

Best we ask our children.

Even better if we listen to their answers and follow where they lead.