Alumnus pens letter to self.
Dear Bilal:
Do not jump into the Facebook thread in which people from your hometown are celebrating your high school’s promise to give detention to any students who walk out in protest of our nation’s inaction against gun violence.
Do not spend hours upon hours explaining how the right to free assembly and protest is also enshrined in the Constitution, immediately preceding the amendment that the NRA uses to make money. Do not assert angrily that years of the so-called adults’ failures on local, state, and national levels to address any of the possible causes of our ongoing tragedy do not earn said adults any trust that they might finally figure out how to solve the problem without the generation behind them screaming in their ears. Do not explain that their suggestions for different forms of protest are based on making themselves feel better, instead of addressing the fact that the victims and future victims have had enough ineffectual thoughts and insincere prayers. Do not craft rejoinders against the people who claim the students lack the intellectual capacity to confront the issue in which you observe that they have somehow lived decades longer while failing to gain a fraction of the knowledge or wisdom of those they now condescend to.
Do not point out that within the past year your high school was forced to admit it had harbored a predatory staff member for several years and failed to protect several members of the student body from him, and that perhaps their credibility when it comes to issuing discipline is on thin ice, at best.
Do not post your comments in that thread. You know nearly none of the people you would be arguing with, your time will be better spent doing anything else, and tomorrow morning they will still be wrong.
Sincerely,
Bilal
Creative Control 