The BLOG: Culture

Hey Kids:  Here’s What Your Anti-Gun Walkout Is Going To Accomplish

Dear Students Participating In The Walkout: 

 

Congrats! I am so proud of you for exercising your right to peacefully assemble. I applaud you. Additionally, I am so proud of you for taking the next realistic step in your education. The one of putting everything you learned in school into practice and the importance of bringing your beliefs, ideals, and dreams into reality.  

This morning, you will walk out in a carefully organized manner to protest guns and the NRA, and to demand that the government do more to protect you with stricter gun laws. Your eyes will be full of hope, your parents will be very proud of you, and they will encourage you. You will stand united as one group of students to send a loud and resounding message of “enough.”

You will have followed everything to a “T.” Everything your teachers taught you will come to fruition. Media will cover you, but not nearly as much as they did during the Parkland shooting. But, they will cover you, because it’s an event. 

Then, on March 15, you will go to class, proud that you have protested. And then reality will start to slowly sink in. 

You will learn these valuable lessons in the next few weeks:

1.  The media covered you, but they only covered you for a day. Congrats, my dear children, you are protesting in the wrong month. You see, the National Walkout Day should occur in February, May, or November. That is when the media puts everything to the forefront and will talk about it nonstop. (Because those are sweeps times, when the Nielsen ratings matter more than at other times.) Didn’t you wonder why you haven’t heard a lot of the shooting in Parkland since … March 5?

2.  The lawmakers will make promises … again just to appease you for the moment … and then not do anything. Because the lawmakers really don’t care about gun laws. They say they do, but they don’t. 

3.  You will notice that the only people who are actually influencing any change are the businesses. Businesses such as Dick’s, Kroger, and Walmart are all raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21. Other businesses, like Delta, Hertz, and Metlife, have cut ties with the NRA. Because, they recognize that the Feds won’t do anything but they can. And they have. But the federal government and your protests did not cause that. You see, they made that decision to stop it some time ago.

4.  After a few months, you will notice that the whole gun control thing has vanished. And the hard, cold reality will have sunk in that when you walked out to send a powerful message for the world to hear … they didn’t listen to a word you said or stood for. You just wasted your time and efforts that you could have used getting an education. 

Do not be disheartened, my young friends, because the sooner you learn that protesting accomplishes nothing more than a false feeling that you are doing something, the sooner you will learn that the utopia that academia has told you about, doesn’t exist. The real world has rules too. The first rule you should learn is that life isn’t fair, and it doesn’t have to be. The only thing you can do is keep trying.

 

Amie Flanagan is a writer, blogger and social media specialist. You can follow her on FacebookTwitter, and Pinterest. She currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina.