A role for youth in stopping gun violence: 2-21-18
February 21, 2018
What role can people of faith play in the struggle to end gun violence? And what role is there for young people in this, especially high school and college students?
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, who leads a congregation in south Florida, writes here that it's now up to those young people to change the country's gun culture because their parents and grandparents failed to do it.
I think he's right.
"It is now up to the kids," he writes, "to the teens and the hipsters and the young people in their twenties. They now have to do it. They now have to fight against American gun culture.
"We tried.
"Actually – no, we didn’t. We think that we tried, but we didn’t do nearly enough. We screamed, but not loudly enough. We have been too nice, too polite, too neat."
So one obvious place for young people to begin is not to agree to go along with the weird idea in Neosho, Mo., as reported here by The Kansas City Star, to have third graders "sell raffle tickets for an AR-15 to benefit their traveling baseball team."
Parents, of course, should never have agreed to let their kids do that. But the kids can learn to say no to such foolishness, too, and in the process maybe teach their parents and grandparents something.
Our legislators have failed us in seeking to protect Second Amendment rights while also regulating gun ownership and use in a sensible way.
So maybe Rabbi Salkin is right. It's time for the kids to lead the way. And, I would add, it's time for congregations from every faith tradition to make their voices heard, too.
The good news is, as Kansas City Star editorial page columnist Melinda Henneberger noted in this column on Tuesday, kids in big numbers already are rising to the challenge.
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UNDERSTANDING THE SPIRITUALITY OF 'BLACK PANTHER'
For those of you (myself included) who haven't yet seen "Black Panther," be aware of what Religion News Service in this piece calls "the spiritual imagination that undergirds the movie." The cosmology that informs the people featured in the film is uniquely African, and a "pivotal early scene in the movie engages African cosmology and varieties of African spirituality on many levels," RNS reports. I've got to clear some space on my calendar to see this film. And I hope you will, too.
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P.S.: My obit/analysis about Billy Graham now is on The Kansas City Star's website here.
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