As I write this, my daughter is sleeping peacefully in her bed, and the news is flashing nightmarish updates about the latest shooting on a college campus. Like most parents, I spend my days navigating how much of this information to let in and how much to shut out, to create a sense of solace for our family. But can there be solace anywhere when students are shooting each other, and themselves? Can we honestly go on telling these stories as if each is the result of one mentally ill young person and not a barometer of our national mental health? I wish that instead of one more psychologist being interviewed about personality disorders and their corresponding drugs, someone would connect some dots call this tragic trend what it is—an outbreak of simmering insecurity that is, if anything is, a matter of national security. Then maybe we would spend some of our resources looking inward rather than outward for what threatens us.
In addition to being a mother, I am a college professor. I love my job and am grateful that it allows me to learn from young people. Last fall, I asked my freshman classes to write research papers and give presentations on topics of their choice, and many wrote about issues affecting their generation.
They wrote about prescription drug abuse—how so many people their age are medicated for ADD, anxiety and depression, and how many fiddle with their meds in order to focus in school, calm down, lose weight, or, increasingly, get high. These prescriptions are easily available online, but most don’t even need to sneak around to get drugs, because their parents and doctors have been providing them for years with few questions asked.
They wrote about parental pressures—to test well, to go to the best possible school and then to get a lucrative job in order to pay off astronomical college debt. Several of my students said they would like to be teachers or international health workers but have been told that they won’t be able to “afford” these professions.
They wrote about media pressures to be rich, thin and successful—in short, to identify entirely with external values rather than internal values, which, some admitted, are hard to even identify at this point. While media pressures have been around for decades, they have never been as invasive as they are now, with advertisers text messaging cell phones and reality television insidiously replacing “reality.”
And what is their reality—the one that doesn’t make it onto TV? These students have grown up during wartime. September 11 crashed into the beginning of their adolescence. Yet, unlike the “Greatest Generation,” they do not face a clear enemy, and they hear a world community criticizing US military involvement rather than soliciting it. And unlike the Viet Nam generation, they do not see their war on national television—ever. They have friends fighting and falling, but they do not see their struggles or their faces, nor do they see the faces of the “enemy.” The result is a war that is increasingly abstract and terrorizing, and an enemy that could be anyone sitting on the bus, or in the classroom.
In the two weeks that my students gave their presentations, there was a shooting in a shopping mall and another shooting on a school bus--both by people their age. I asked what they thought was going on and saw a haze of emotion on their faces. They have been living with vague orange and yellow alerts since they were kids. Fear is in their atmosphere and is one element of their isolation.
There is no way to summarize the pain and confusion behind these shootings, and no way to reconcile their losses. But my students told me that they see so much violence on television and in video games, they don’t know how to feel the reality of it. They also told me that there is not a big enough difference between pulling a trigger in violent video games and pulling a trigger in real life. We know this is true because the military uses video games as training tools to help soldiers cross the psychological barrier to killing another human being. Military research proves that if an 18- or 21-year old shoots often enough at a computer target, they can shoot and kill another person with far less anxiety.
Young people are deeply passionate and impressionable, and they have always been the ones to react first and most dramatically to hypocrisy. These shootings are terribly hopeless acts from a despairing minority. They are suicide bombs much like those of our “enemies.” And they suggest whole groups of young people who do not see a way out of a culture that profits at their expense.
Every parent wants the best for his or her child, but I think we need to reevaluate what “the best” means. I am at the beginning of my journey as a parent, and I do not know yet what specific challenges, joys and griefs it will hold. I do know that I enter the process with many questions. I wonder how much longer we can afford the kind of “prosperity” our country has been living for, the kind that puts us into competition with one another and implies that we are different and better than other people in the world. I wonder if I will be able to identify short-sightedness—in myself and in society—and protect my daughter from mainstream values that seem to me skewed and dishonest. I wonder if I will be able to stay conscious, to be a guide and companion for her as she creates a meaningful life, because it is clear to me that new, more humane and rigorous meanings must be created.
I think the best way to respond to my child is with all the honesty and attention that I can muster. And the best way to respond to this tragic insanity is with all the sanity we can muster—with gun control legislation, of course, but also with a deeper look at ourselves, our families and communities. Sanity must begin with the difficult and necessary evaluation of our anxiety and its masking addictions—to consumption, prescriptions, violence, hectic schedules, frenetic media, and to ideas about America that are no longer true. If we can find the courage to see ourselves, then, together with our kids, we can begin creating a future they can live with.
About Me
- Rachel Jamison Webster
- I grew up in the small town of Madison, Ohio, and now live in Evanston, IL, where I am an Artist in Residence (in poetry) at Northwestern University. I also edit the online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse, located at www.universeofpoetry.org. My poems have been published in many journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Madison Review, Perihelion and blossombones, and I have won a few awards for my writing and teaching, including an Academy of American Poets' Young Poets Prize. For several years, I created and taught writing workshops for city teens, and in this capacity, co-edited two anthologies of writing by Chicago youth, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2005). I have my MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. I am happy to give readings or workshops, and may be contacted at r-webster@northwestern.edu. Thank you for reading, and best wishes to you.
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