“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.” — Bob Dylan

Perhaps very few developments in the year 2018 have caused me as much anger as the phony and deliberately poisonous contentions that teen-agers protesting gun violence in the schools are not students, but “crisis actors.” This phenomenon has reared its ugly head too often on social media since the tragic Parkland (Fla.) shootings that killed 17 students.

The aftermath has produced heroic and intelligent commentary from young people and at the same time scurrilous and wildly inaccurate suggestions that these kids are being coached and misled. Things came closer to home this week when a number of students took part in the national walkout to take a stand against the proliferations of assault weapons.

The ringleader of the protest at the Allegan Vocation Technical Center was someone I know well, Austin Marsman, a Martin High School senior who writes for this publication and is incredibly wise and intelligent beyond his years.

It was more than insulting when I read State Senator Tonya Shuitmaker’s response to the ceremony, as quoted by WZZM-TV: “I am greatly disappointed in the adults who are encouraging these demonstrations which are nothing more than a statement which solves nothing.”

She might as well have been quoted as saying, “Children should be seen and not heard.” In the original form of this proverb, it was specifically young women who were expected to keep quiet. This opinion is recorded in the 15th century collections of homilies written by an Augustinian clergyman called John Mirk in Mirk’s Festial, circa 1450.

Schuitmaker wrongly seems to assume teen-agers who took part in this exercise were manipulated and coached by adults, perhaps teachers. I know Austin Marsman too well, and I can tell you he wasn’t coached or misled.

It also is an affront to assert that the teens’ action will solve nothing. All I’ve witnessed over the years is non-action by state and federal legislators. If allowed to continue, as it has after other tragedies such as Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, it will indeed be for naught. But that’s on Tonya’s head and the heads of her colleagues in Lansing and Washington D.C.

When the Parkland shooting occurred Feb. 14, I was frustrated in realizing nothing has been done for nearly two decades by people I thought we elected to solve problems. These people apparently were elected to do the bidding of their donors.

One of the politicos who wants to succeed Schuitmaker as State Senator, Allegan County Clerk Bob Genetski, also was caught this week tweeting that David Hogg, one of the students at the high school that suffered the shooting, was perhaps an actor doing the bidding of CNN. He tried feebly to walk it back, but the damage has been done.

The responses of Schuitmaker and Genetski do absolutely nothing to advance the serious discussion and if anything, they exacerbate a terrible stain on this nation.

I stand with the kids, some of whom likely just wanted to get 17 minutes off school Wednesday, but many others who picked up a terrific lesson in standing up for the principles of free speech and the right to assemble for redress of grievances. Their actions took me back 50 years, when I marched against the Vietnam War, only later realizing that most of my comrades simply didn’t want to be killed. I suppose that’s what motives these youngsters as well.