#NeverAgain

I've heard more common sense adult wisdom coming from the mouths of teens in the past week than I'd heard since, well...I was a teenager. Yes, we saw the bullshit coming from our parents, but we didn't have the Internet and social networks to unite us into a movement. We had Mad magazine and George Carlin, but it wasn't until we were in our early twenties and the Vietnam War intensified that we were able to unite into a force. We did, though, and changed America.

We didn't grow up with a national fear of terrorism, but we did grow up with air raid drills and the possibility of a nuclear war with the Russians. The Cuban Missile Crisis politicized me for all time. And then those blockheads in Washington expanded the military draft. We could be plucked out of civilian life at 18 years old and be sent to fight an unwinnable and unpopular war in Vietnam. We could be sent to war, but we couldn't buy a beer or vote. As now, there were people in the older generation who helped us and encouraged us to fight against the establishment.

When I was a young cartoonist starting out, a bunch of us met with I.F. Stone, a man in his late sixties then who was waging his own journalistic war on the corrupt generals and Pres. Lyndon Johnson with his newspaper, "I.F. Stone Weekly." He was encouraging and inspirational. I will do the same for this new wave of young people who may have been children last month but have been forced into early young adulthood at the barrel of an AR-15.