I live in gun country and Trump country, and personally, I don’t know a single gun owner who is opposed to some reasonable steps to stop the slaughter thousands of Americans, including many children, from gun violence. A conservative estimate is 30,000 deaths a year. Nor do I know of any friend or non-gun owner here or elsewhere who is thinking about repealing the Second Amendment, even it that would be a practical impossibility.

I think as a first step, they – and me – would like it to be harder for disturbed and violent people to buy submachine guns (I wouldn’t miss them if they were gone) or control the number and free flow of guns in America, which are now killing children almost daily. So we are going to march this afternoon in our town, they call it a “March For Our Lives,” and I call it a March For Sanity.

I believe children have  constitutional right to not be butchered in their schools, and that our lawmakers have a constitutional duty to protect them.

More than 90 per cent of Americans support some limited and reasonable gun controls, and we are all awakening to find out that our political leaders have been purchased like tomatoes in a supermarket, they value the money they get more than the lives of their young constituents. I suspect we all know this will be  resolved in the voting booth and not on the streets.

Social scientists point out that million-person marches excite the media but don’t seem to change anything.  Once the marches are over, people move on.  The civil rights movement built a vast bi-racial political structure and it took them 18 years to win voting rights.

Our attention spans are usually not as long as eighteen years. The sociologists blame the Internet for fooling people into thinking that a Facebook post is the same thing as a long-term plan or structure for changing laws. Facebook is great at getting people to march, but it is not a structure, it has no focus, people move on to different subjects every other minute.

The remarkable  kids from Parkland, Fla. seem to have gotten that message and are setting out to build a long-term coalition to elect representatives who will do their duty and protect them, rather than parrot the angry messages of ideologues doing the dirty work of the gun lobby.

Facebook works both ways. They can get people to march, they can also get people to vote against any member of Congress who votes against them – on either side.

I honor these children, they know they have to break through the constipated monologue by thinking differently and acting differently. And they really know how to use social media rather than be intimidated by it.

In some of the marches, they are asking people over 21 to march behind the students. I would be happy to do that. My generation has failed them, I am happy to stand behind them. All they want from me is money, a march or two and a vote. They will get all of those things.

I will be interested to see  how many people march in my small town on Main Street at 2 p.m. Maria is carrying a stick with her crochet gun sculpture attached. If lots of people get out to march here – in 2016 Trump signs popped up like dandelions, my first sense of what was building.

This is up to these brave and articulate children, they have great credibility with me. It is their struggle now, I think, and they have taken it up with great focus and determination. My job is to help when asked, and otherwise march behind them.

To be honest, I doubt I will be alive in 18 years to see these children triumph. Maybe it won’t take them as long. Whether I live to see it or not doesn’t really matter. it’s one of those look-in-the-mirror-and-like-what-you-see things. If I didn’t help, I could not respect the face that I see.