I was talking with the mother of one of the March For Our Lives organizers in Amarillo, Texas, when the thought recurred to me.

“You know something?” I said Saturday. “I never once — ever — had this conversation with my parents when I was in school. Not in grade school, junior high or high school. My mother never told me to to ‘stay safe’ when she sent me off to school.”

Indeed, Mom and Dad always assumed I would return home at the end of the school day. There never was a single thought that I ever remember that someone would open fire with a weapon in school.

Oh, how we have entered a new era.

The March For Our Lives event in Amarillo was just one of hundreds of other community events called to demand remedies to the gun violence that has killed so many children, teachers and others.

Violeta Prieto, the mother of Carla Prieto — an Amarillo march organizer — responded to me that neither did she have that discussion with her parents. And she graduated from Palo Duro High School just 21 years ago, in 1997. I reminded her with a chuckle that “I am a whole lot older than you are.”

We would take part in fire drills and those once-quaint “duck and cover” drills to prepare us to respond to a possible nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It was the “cold war” back then. Those drills don’t seem quite so quaint these days in light of recent international developments … but, I digress; more on that another time.

Today’s students and their loved ones are facing a potential “hot war” in the fight to eradicate gun violence in our schools and other public places.

And while I’m on this topic, I must share with you that we have members of our family who likely are having — or will have — discussions with young children that we never dreamed of having. I don’t recall talking with our now 40-something sons about gun violence when they were in school; they graduated from high school in 1991 and 1992.

So … this is new to us. It is chilling in the extreme to wrap our heads around the potential danger facing our children in communities throughout the country.

I join them in their fright.