I qualified that last sentence because, despite the media's apotheosis of the students and their demonstration, decades of teaching high school students has made me both cautious and curious.
I wonder, for example, how many of the young men who joined those demonstrations went home that afternoon and sat down to play violent video games in which the object is to kill as many virtual enemies as possible.
I wonder, too, how many students who walked out of their classes just wanted to get out of school or to stick their thumb in the eye of school authorities or were otherwise indifferent to the fears that motivated their classmates.
Many schools of course condoned the walkouts, but I wonder how enthusiastically schools and the media would've supported these students had they been demonstrating against the vast number of people slaughtered in our nation's abortion clinics or the hundreds of people killed every year by illegal immigrants.
I wonder what the media would've said about the exploitation of five to twelve year olds by adults who used children as props in these demonstrations had the cause they were protesting been, say, the devastation wrought on their families by liberal policies like easy divorce and other fallout from the sexual revolution.
I wonder, also, how Hollywood celebrities can piously deplore gun violence in his country while making their living performing in movies which glorify precisely that very kind of violence.
I wonder, finally, how many of the politicians and journalists who used this walkout as another lever to weaken the voters' resistance to disarming the citizenry themselves employ bodyguards or carry weapons.
In other words, although I'm sure thousands of those students were sincerely and justly concerned about the terrible carnage that's been visited upon our schools over the last decade or two, I nevertheless wonder how much hypocrisy we were treated to last week by some of their schoolmates and faculty and even more by our media and politicians.
