Listen to the Children

Every once in a while, if you listen closely, you’ll hear that children have something important to say.

When my daughter was only 10, she watched me lighting up a cigarette one day and said, “That will kill you.”

The tone in her voice and the expression on her face were a mixture of confusion and sadness.

They had been studying in school the dangers of cigarette smoking, and she was wondering why, if everyone knew that smoking was dangerous, her own father was lighting up. Thereafter, whenever I took out a cigarette, she’d stare at me long and hard in silence, that same expression on her face, until I began asking myself the question she’d asked. When I couldn’t answer, I quit smoking.

A lot of children in L.A. are posing a question that isn’t too dissimilar. They’re asking why, if guns are so dangerous, so many people have them?

This all began with 11-year-old twins Niko and Theo Milonopoulos, bright and caring boys who have decided that someone ought to do something about all the gun violence.

So they’ve created an organization called Kidz Voice-LA and have begun circulating petitions demanding that the city outlaw the selling of bullets.

As one of them puts it, “I know we’re not old enough to vote, but neither are the kids who are being killed.”

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They’ve drawn up a logo that depicts the faces of children of different colors and ethnic groups shouting, “Cease fire!” Across the bottom it says: “Stand up. Speak up. Grow up Safe.”

It was part of a presentation that won them a trip to Paris earlier this year as two of 10 U.S. representatives to the 1998 international Disney Children’s Summit on Growing Up.

Growing up, the boys decided, wasn’t an option when bullets were flying.

Their plan of action in the proposal to Disney included circulating petitions against bullets, and that’s what they’re doing now.

“The National Rifle Assn. would fight us if we asked the [City] Council to outlaw guns,” Niko said, “so we decided on bullets.”

The boys, sometimes driven around by parents George and Constantina, are spending their summer visiting parks and schools, clipboards in hand, asking other kids to join in their effort to reach adulthood.

What began politicizing them, their mother says, was the killing of Ennis Cosby near their school and the wild violence of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout.

“We became afraid,” Niko said one day, seated side by side with his brother at a table in their San Fernando Valley home.

“It could happen right in our school,” Theo said.

The school campus killings in Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., raised their fears, and it was their decision, not that of their parents, to take their cause to other children. So far they’ve gathered 500 signatures. Their goal is 60,000.

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Whenever I write about the dangers of mass gun ownership, I hear from the macho-obsessed soldiers of the NRA, one hand on their testicles, the other on their Uzis, who proclaim their “right” to bear arms.

It was Theo who responded for both him and his brother by asking the kind of question that sweetly innocent young people can frame so simply and so beautifully: “Kids don’t have a lot of rights,” he said, “but don’t we at least have the right to grow up?”

They are joined in the question and on the petition sheets by a Johnson, a Chang and a Kromolowski; by a Brown, an O’Brien and a Nunez; by a Bernstein, a Kitagawa and a Jimenez.

“This was all their own idea,” their mother says. “We watch the news every evening and discuss the issues of the day. We want them not only to survive in whatever society they’re growing up in but to understand that society and improve it.”

The boys have written letters to City Council members and to members of the L.A. school board in an effort to institute a Kids Awareness Day at every school in the city.

It is the nature of these sweetly innocent young men, schooled by their parents in the sanctity of living things, to abhor violence. How this might someday be tainted by their exposure to a culture running amok is impossible to predict.

But if these two, Niko and Theo, leave us at least with a lingering question, we might at some point consider an adequate answer.

They’re making a statement. Listen to the children.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com