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Commentary: We need new words to find peace and safety

The war that is raging now is being waged in schools and churches, acted out by lone gunmen.

(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) L-R, students Isaac Reese, Mathew Davis, Elizabeth Love and Sophie Davies meet in Sugar House to organize the upcoming March For Our Lives, urging gun reform in the wake of a Florida school shooting. Monday, Feb. 19, 2018.

When I was a junior high school student, the Vietnam War was raging across the sea and young male draftees were returning to their hometowns in coffins. It was clear to me and the young people around me that the war needed to stop.

It wasn’t clear to my father, a Word War II veteran. Stopping the war would mean defeat, and this great country could not be connected with defeat. Other adults expressed that stopping the war would dishonor the deaths of all the soldiers who had died so far.

“You are stomping on their graves,” I heard when I decided to join the moratorium march in my own town of Eau Claire, Wis., to end the war on Oct. 15, 1969.

I sought compromise and made armbands that were white and black to show that we wanted the war to end but we valued the lives that had been lost.

Pete Seeger led more than 40,000 marchers in Washington in “Give Peace a Chance.” Finally, in 1973, after the deaths of many more American soldiers and Vietnamese, the war was ended. The students had led the way. The need for change did not need rumination. Our friends, siblings and siblings’ friends were either dying or in danger.

The war that is raging now is being waged in schools and churches, acted out by lone gunmen. Adults, like me, are calling for gun control and fewer guns, and other adults are calling to have more guns using words like, “We must stand our ground.” We are at a dangerous stalemate.

After the tragic shooting in Parkland, I read that talk of gun control just raises the sale of guns. The old words that we have been harping on for years have only accompanied and even encouraged a more and more dangerously armed country.

We need those young people whose friends died in the shootings to take up the cause. We need new words that don’t just strengthen the bunkers but open our nation to difficult solutions. For young people who go to school wondering if they could be the target of an automatic weapon, the solution of stopping the craziness is a no-brainer, just as stopping the war was a no-brainer to many people of my generation.

I have come to believe that the youth must lead the way. After all, theirs are the lives at stake. They have the power as we had to change the conversation, to shake us out of our old rhetoric.

I am taking the whole day on March 24 to March for Our Lives in Salt Lake City. I wonder if there will be a new song that we sing thousands strong. I will add my voice to their words.

I was asked to give the prayer to open a session of the Utah Senate a little over a week after the mass shootings in Parkland:

“We come before you this week, remembering the students and teachers whose lives were cut short by violence. May our ears hear the outpouring of grief and the wisdom of those whose friends died in their arms. May our minds open to the hard and loving work that is before us that will bring safety to our children. Amen.”

Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune The Rev. Patty Willis, South Valley Unitarian Society, calls for support of the Muslim community during a news conference where religious and community leaders gathered at the Madina Masjid Islamic Center in Salt Lake City to show support, Friday, March 10, 2017.

The Rev. Patty C. Willis is pastor of the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, Salt Lake City.