Bad Decision Yesterday - Center of Gravity Today

Today is International Pi Day. We celebrate mathematics today, on the 14th day of March, because, well, it’s 3.14. And on today’s commemoration of Pi, we also celebrate the best of what makes these United States of America – our differences.

Students around the country are walking out of schools in a show of solidarity for the seventeen lives lost in Parkland, Florida. Their cause – safer schools. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Tea Party, it doesn’t matter the political leaning, it doesn’t even matter if the person even has children of his or her own, every adult in America supports the idea of safer schools. Safer inner city schools offer kids growing up in challenging environments a respite from a life that requires them to grow up too soon. Safer inner city schools offer kids the chance to be better, to lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty and drugs and crime that keeps them bound to the city and the streets. Safer rural schools give children the chance to explore the world outside their limited view, which is usually homogenous and protected. Safer rural schools give kids the chance to be more than farmers, more than coal miners.

Despite my sweeping generalizations, we tend to agree that safer schools are a good idea. However, we may disagree on how to get there. Conservatives espouse more freedom to bear arms as the answer. Liberals espouse fewer guns. Moderates like me espouse actually enforcing the laws we currently have as a good place to start. But the one thing we all have in common is, as American citizens, we have the right to our own opinion, the right to disagree, and as will be represented at 10:00 a.m. today in schools across the nation, the right to protest for our beliefs.

It’s not the topic of the protest that makes this country great. It’s the protest itself. Children who on Tuesday may have struggled internally with peer pressure to eat a Tide Pod can be heard internationally by walking out of school. Adolescents who just this morning couldn’t even be bothered to make their beds or completely clear their windshields before driving to school can be at the center of the safe schools and gun control debates simply by standing up and walking out with friends.

And in these United States we praise their ability to protest. It’s one of the things that makes America great! Children of Republican and Democrat legislators will stand hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm and will stand in silence for seventeen kids they never knew. These same children won’t remain silent long enough for presentation of Colors or to hear the National Anthem, yet we will pay attention to their protest for safer schools.

That is what makes America great.