Be Heard, Be Seen

Let’s take heart and look forward to March 24 when the youth lead the nation in their great national protest against the NRA and nonmilitary murder. (Your right to bear arms? Certainly! Get a musket!)

I wish I could join them in DC. Maybe a million adults will do so!

Each day I think of these students’ courage, intelligence, and passion, and I recall Einstein’s remark about the youth. I once met him on a wedding-present trip to Princeton.

It was June 1945, and Einstein surely knew that Hiroshima lay in America’s future. We asked him about socialism as an option for ending wars and hunger.

The old man (wearing a light blue V-neck sweater with raveled elbows) said he believed “something better” was ahead for us, something more intelligent than “these bad times. The students will be there in every future.” He said he had given his house in Berlin to the Jewish youth group. “The young people keep coming along — they’re always there. We can count on them.”

At the time I didn’t think it was so great to “count on the youth” because I was 18. Today I wholly agree with Professor Einstein. The students’ presence, this historic strike-back, brings me tears and gratitude and even a bit of hope.

If only the worn and cynical Sanders troops and Democratic Party, the unions, NAACP, UFW, and all those women in their defiant pink pussy hats would join the students massing in DC and every state capital. The instruments of change are there, able to communicate, voting with their very bodies.

Maybe I can take my cane and go stand at City Hall at noon on March 24, a chance to testify and make my vote visible.