i wanted to say something about the feelings aroused by the kids who spoke for peace and love at the march for our lives, yet a wariness comes creeping with hope nowadays. the yearning for some real hope is always tinged with despair at the present cynicism that informs our lives and our world. i was telling someone about how eloquent the voices of the kids and heard the reply that the arms dealers have children too. i imagine the children of the n.r.a also want to live, and are tired of their lives being threatened by weapons and the culture of violence for profit. 
as i'm reading the seabird's cry i come across things said of these awesome birds that remind me of the children. they embody genius. they are the opposite of entropy and emblems of hope. we're still living in the nightmare world of descartes, the world of automata, the separation of body and soul, exclusively human, but we've seen for aeons humans behaving like automata toward other humans, and the divisions are endless and corresponding to various ideologies and thieving killing regimes. 
the feeling of adults has gotten desensitized by a culture without compassion, without sensitivity, with more regard for money than life, bought and sold by the extractive economy like any commodity. 
something shifted with this latest school slaughter. the cruelty of the system, the innocence of children who want to live and learn. they've learned the system, and they reject that system that disdains their freedom and their precious lives. they know guns are not symbols of freedom but of death.

***
if Umwelt is the product of close and extreme attention to the things that matter in your life, and indifference to those that don't, then we have probably reached the moment when what matters to us has expanded beyond our own narrowly and historically defined interests. for all the vertigo this thought might induce, the human Umwelt now is and needs to be global. we have, of necessity, entered the age of empathy.

adam nicolson,
the seabird's cry