How does one plan a national walkout?

We’re living in a country where the Republican vice presidential candidate believes that school shootings are a fact of life in contemporary American society. The answer, of course, is more guns because schools (and concert venues and churches and grocery stores and movie theaters and shopping malls and…) are “soft targets” which need to be better protected.

I disagree. They’re not “soft targets,” they’re places where human beings should be able to go without fear of being shot.

You know what the “soft targets” are? Our children’s bodies.

Why are we collectively allowing the people who are paid to represent us do nothing when our children are killed while attending school? Our laying down and allowing our children’s lives to be taken in their classrooms, rather than enacting common sense gun law reform, undoubtedly communicates something to the world about this country’s priorities

It most certainly conveys a message to our children.

Guns are more important than children’s lives.

The math of guns + more guns = increased safety doesn’t add up. It makes perfect sense to me, however, that if educators and students, and any other community member who shares the belief that America’s gun laws must be reformed, united and refused to enter schools until something significant had changed, we might finally get somewhere.

Speaking of numbers, we lose hours, and even days, of instructional time while we teach (there are 12 various required drills) children how to hide from active shooters. Erring on the side of caution, we respond to anonymous threats with lockdowns, lockouts and the cancellations of activities kids truly enjoy.

And we wonder why kids have anxiety and feel disconnected? How do we not see a source of their depression?

It’s been more than 25 years since Columbine, a quarter century of being incredulous that our government won’t take on the NRA, and their supporters in the gun rights lobby, to protect our children. I keep waiting for something to happen, something to change, for someone to organize a protest in response to this “fact of (American only) life.”

Today, I thought, “maybe it needs to be me.” And you. And you, too.

So, I ask again – how does one plan a national walkout?