Categories
life

Paranoia

Yesterday, I went to the chiropractor—my first time ever. Despite having decades of back issues, I’ve been skeptical of the whole “science” of chiropractic, but I know enough people who swear by it that I figured it was time to give it a shot.

(Quick context: I throw out my back about two or three times a year, usually from something as mundane as sneezing)

A friend recommended a certain place, and I researched them. The two people who run it are licensed chiropractic doctors, married to each other, and part of the statewide and national chiropractic associations. They’ve been in business for years. I researched their doctorate. They both went to (and met at) Life University.

Life University? Really? First red flag.

So I researched the university. It’s struggled for years with its accreditation, but it currently has it.

Okay, it’s accredited, which reduces the red flag to a yellow flag. Plus, I have two (relatively) closed-down colleges on my resume, so who am I to judge? Besides, my friend swore by the place.

I made the appointment, and yesterday, I headed down.

I checked in and was sitting in the waiting room. Everything seemed good. There were good vibes in the place, and it looked professional.

About three minutes after I walked in, some dude in gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie came in. He went to the front desk and said, “Kyle Callahan.”

(If you don’t know, that’s my name).

The receptionist greeted him like she knew him and told him that one of the doctors would be with him in a minute.

So he sat a couple of seats down from me. I didn’t say anything, but my mind was like, “Who the hell is this dude, and why does he know my name?” My first thought was that maybe they had part-time contracted chiropractors who came in and did the preliminary work, kind of like dental hygienists. Maybe?

The doctor came out of his office and invited the dude in. They shut the door. Three or four minutes passed, and the dude came out and sat down again. I thought, “Okay, that was kind of the consult so the doctor could tell this dude what to do with me.”

Then the other doctor came out and called for me to come back. She led me into an exam room where I watched a five-minute video about spines, nerves, and chiropractic medicine. Then she returned, and we reviewed a history of my back problems. She then used a wand to measure my vertebrae in a few different ways, told me she’d get the data back at the end of the day, and that I needed to come back later in the week for a diagnosis and possible treatment plan.

She led me back to the receptionist so I could pay the bill and schedule my next appointment. During the walk to the front, I thought, “Okay, but who the hell is that dude?? Why does he know my name?!” My next thought was that this was all a scam, and the doctors had hired this dude to dig into my finances and insurance and find the best way to get all of my money out of me.

With my mind kind of freaking out, I made the appointment and stood at the desk, typing the information into the calendar on my phone. The doctor came back into the front, leaned out to the dude in the waiting room, and said, “Kyle, we’re ready now.”

At that point, I kind of exploded. I was like, “Hold up! Dude, what’s your name?” The doctor started laughing and said, “I know, right!” The dude was confused and said, “Kyle?”

“Kyle what?” I asked.

“Kyle Calanan.”

Categories
asides

Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+

From Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.

Categories
life

Dog Bites Childhood

My most vivid memory of the now-famous Dave Portnoy involves running down the side of his house while his family’s dog, which I don’t think was big, barked at and chased me. I remember tears in my eyes. I was probably eleven or twelve years old. We had gone to his house either before or after Pop Warner football practice. That was the last time I ever went to Dave Portnoy’s house.

I remember walking down the hill across from the basketball court with my best friend beside me. We’re maybe ten or twelve years old. A sleek black dog shoots out from a driveway across the street to our left. Without care for my friend, I drop the basketball and streak down the hill. Before my heart beats twice, I am down the hill, across the busy street, and through the fence to (what I somehow imagine) is the safety of the basketball court. I don’t remember what happened behind me, but I know the dog did not attack my friend.

I’m maybe fourteen years old. I have a job washing dishes at a pizza joint within walking distance of my parents’ house. My oldest brother, a pizza-delivery driver, got me the job. Except for the owner, everyone who works there is from the neighborhood. I’ve known all of them (at least by reputation) my whole life.

The walk from work to home takes me past backyards I’ve played hide-and-go-seek in. I know which neighbors don’t mind kids on their property and which ones will yell at you. I’ve lost a good number of toys in these trees. This is my neighborhood and has been for (maybe?) fourteen years.

But for some reason, I don’t know the dog whose owner hasn’t tied it up on a property that doesn’t have a fence around it, nor do I expect the dog to dart from the shadows of those thick bushes like a monster from my nightmares; but my body knows it needs to run.

I decide which closest mother in which closest house will save me, and I run to her. I spent my formative years standing in the back vestibule of her apartment, hovering between the screen door to her backyard and the door to her kitchen, waiting for one of her two sons to come out and play with my brothers and me. Sprinting down the avenue, I hope she’ll be able to answer her front door before this dog, this monster I hadn’t known to be wary of, catches me between its jaws and violently ends my life.

My memory of this terrified sprint begins like a crane shot in a movie. A short, skinny teenaged kid races across the bottom of the frame only to be followed by an athletic dog on the chase. The memory smashes into my first-person perspective as I grab the metal railing at the bottom of my neighbor’s stairs and pivot my direction ninety degrees without losing momentum. I’m up the stairs in a bouncy-camera kind of way, and the camera looks back over my shoulder as the dog clumsily tries to make its cut without the benefit of the railing. Somehow I’ve wedged myself between my neighbor’s metal screen door already, shielding my body from the dog’s sure-to-be-blood-stained fangs. With one hand, I try to turn the black knob on my neighbor’s front door, and with the other, I pull the outer screen door tighter against me. I scream for help and beg at the top of my lungs for the dog to go away. The dog leaps at the door repeatedly. Its nails scrape against the metal; its snout pushes at the screen. The monster barks and barks.

I don’t want to die.

The door opens behind me, and I stumble backward into the front vestibule and into my friends’ mother’s plump body. She catches me before she knows who I am, and then a look of concern and confusion comes over her face as she recognizes me. The dog’s weight against the screen door slams it shut, and the dog barks and barks on the other side of it. I hear its desperate desire to mangle my body.

My friend’s mother looks out at the animal, brushes me aside, opens the door, steps out onto her porch, and commands the dog to go away. To my surprise, it does. It spins and bounds down the stairs with no animosity towards her nor any fear of her authority. From the bottom of the steps, the dog turns and looks up at me, and I realize it just wants to play. I look up at my friend’s mother, and I can see on her face that she’s embarrassed for me. I ask if I can stay for a little bit and catch my breath, but secretly, I’m giving the dog enough time to run back home.

“Of course,” my friends’ mother says.

I choose to wait in the vestibule.

My fear of dogs was a known thing in my neighborhood. The other parents knew that when I came over, they would have to put the dog “away.” Usually, they just let it into the backyard and that was that. If they forgot, I’d sheepishly ask my friends’ mothers if their dogs could go outside for a while or if it could get shut inside a room, and there would always be a look when I asked, a kind of eye roll or a “for god’s sake,” and even as a small kid, I knew they were embarrassed for me.

I remember sitting on the floor of the dining room of my friend’s house. We’re playing with our G.I. Joe action figures. His little gray dog, which they’ve “put away,” scratches on the opposite side of the door next to me. I remember trying my hardest not to ask my friend to put the dog in a different room, one that was farther away. I remember trying to be brave.

But I also knew that if he didn’t stop his dog from scratching at the door, the tiny little monster would rip through it and tear me apart.

My terror overwhelmed my ability to think. Terrified, I leaped from the floor, ran from his house, and burst down his hill. At the bottom, I turned left, dashed up my street and down my driveway. I charged up the steps, through the back door and across the kitchen floor. I sprinted down our three-step hallway, grabbed the wooden banister on my left to support my at-speed-one-eighty, then onetwothreefour double-steps up the stairs, onto the landing, and into my bedroom. I slammed the door shut behind me, creating one last irrational barrier between me and that terrifying, ankle-high, perfectly-loved, little gray dog.

I still don’t know what my friend thought happened.

Now I’m forty-four years old, and thanks to some beautiful people and their animals, I am no longer terrified of dogs.

I got over my phobia when I entered into a relationship with a young woman whose family owned a dog; love and lust can cause many a person to transcend their fears.

I remain in control of the fear because I recognized it as a phobia — specifically (as the Internet tells me), cynophobia. As such, I see it as just another symptom of my Generalized Anxiety and Panic disorders.

I am lucky enough (at the moment) to have (what I believe) are decent handles on my disorders. I still have panic attacks — the last one was bad enough that I woke my wife in the middle of the night to help me. Still, bad ones are few and far between, and the not-so-bad ones only result in an extended period of irritability (which I try my best [and often fail] to curb for the sake of my family, friends, students, and colleagues).

As I write this, our eleven-month-old dog snores on the couch next to me, her neck surrounded by a blue, blow-up, donut-shaped cushion that we hope will prevent her from tearing at the stitches where her ovaries used to be. I love the little bitch with all my heart.

Despite this undeniable, unconditional love, I daily imagine her cute, sharp teeth tearing the flesh and muscle from my cheek [FLASH] my daughter’s cheek [FLASH] my wife’s cheek. I see it clearly: her crazed, wonky, little eye looking down at me as her fangs tear my face. She doesn’t know what she’s doing — the animal has taken over.

Thankfully, though the anxious vision remains, its effect on me has changed. I don’t run from dogs anymore. I don’t ask my friends to put their dogs in different rooms. I put my face up to my dog’s snout dozens of times a day, and I fall asleep each night with her nails poking in my back. I pry Lego pieces from her mouth, hold her when she barks at the mail carrier, and wrestle with her at playtime.

I might imagine her ferocity, but I know: it’s only my fluid imagination (hey!, that’s the name of this blog!).

The love I feel for our dog makes me sad for the childhood I could have had.

My family owned dogs before I was born, but they didn’t have one when I came along. My oldest brother brought home a puppy when I was three or four, but it bit me too many times and was too much work for my parents to deal with (on top of the three boys they already had), so we got rid of it.

If I hadn’t developed my phobia, I might have begged long enough for my parents to try again. I might have grown up with a dog (or two) and learned the kind of love a child only learns from a dog.

Further, I might not have avoided my friends’ houses throughout elementary, middle, and high school and thus not missed out on critical moments of friendship building.

I might have…I might have…I might have.

But I didn’t.

Thankfully, now my daughter can.

Categories
education

The Mental Health of Middle Schoolers

The 2019-2020 school year marked my tenth year of teaching. I taught at the college level for the first two years. The next two years were at both the college and high-school levels. The next four years were at the middle-school, high-school, and college levels, and the last two years were at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels. 

All of which is to say that I approach middle schoolers in completely the wrong way — I expect them to be college students before I expect them to be themselves. 

My understanding of middle schoolers doesn’t get much beyond the idea that all the middle-school brain cares about is the social dimension. Regardless of whether you ask them to parse a sentence or divide a fraction, all their brain will focus on is what they believe everyone else around them thinks about them.

The progressive response to this reality suggests taking middle-school kids out into the world and letting them explore: bring them to museums, theaters, natural wonders, local haunts, places of work, places of worship, places of celebration, places of mourning, carnivals, recycling factories, beaches, forges, bridges, trollies, ferries, abandoned warehouses, hospitals, sawmills, canning factories, coffee shops, activist headquarters, state houses, volunteer fire departments, parks, science labs, concerts, car garages, wood shops, architects’ offices, etc,

The key to the middle-school brain is exposure. If they focus on how they relate to their various peer groups (what this person thinks about that person, what those people think about them, etc.), let them focus on those things while being surrounded by a wide variety of opportunities. If their brain coincidentally blinks into focusing on something other than the social dimension for a moment, we want to make sure they have something interesting to focus on.

If that’s what their brain is going to do regardless of what adults might want it to do, the question becomes: how do adults help them do it in a healthy way?

First we have to recognize what it means for a middle-school brain to act healthy. In a lot of the education-focused literature I’ve read, the problem comes from the difference between the adult’s expectation of what a middle-school brain ought to be doing and what a middle school brain naturally does. Advice usually revolves around a foci of engagement and excitement, anything that will distract the students from being distracted by their peers.

Instead, I say let them be distracted. Social skills are way more important than math and reading, so adults ought to focus attention there. While we shouldn’t stymie any middle-school child from diving into a book or working on a numerical problem, we don’t want to push too hard in those areas either. We need to work to build an honest and trusting relationship so that the middle schooler is willing to take our healthy advice on how to approach their social challenges. If a teacher struggles to get a student to comply with a homework assignment, how much more will they struggle to get the student to share their hopes and fears?

So, after six years of working with middle school students, I guess that’s my advice: offer them opportunities to explore the wider world and earn their trust so they will believe you when you tell them the only thing they can do to solve their problem is have a difficult talk with the person they most don’t want to talk to.

Oh, and PS: get rid of their fucking cell-phone. You’re handing them a crack pipe, and while it can make a parent’s life so much easier in the short term, it’s doing untold damage to their brains that you (and they) will pay for later.

[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]

Categories
education life politics

Let’s Not Be Too Late

In Defense of an Undiscussed Idea Offered At the Most Recent Town Meeting About The Future of the Green Mountain College Campus

Last week, my town called a second meeting in as many months to discuss the future of the property currently owned by Green Mountain College. I missed the first 20 minutes because I had to take my daughter to Girl Scouts at the elementary school while the meeting was held up at the high school.

When I returned, the president of the college had already spoken, as had one of the representatives the state had sent our way. Now our town manager had the microphone.

I found my wife near the door of the crowded gymnasium, and we took two of the last empty seats on the floor, off to the side of the podium (see the picture above; props to my friend Bill for looking all relaxed and cool).

The town manager spoke about some of the ways he was trying to alleviate the financial losses that will come to the town proper in the wake of the college’s departure. He’s not the most charismatic speaker, so I found myself instead perusing the agenda.

After the introductory speeches, the moderator took back the microphone and told us about our two goals for the meeting. First, he wanted residents to recall the 30 ideas we’d conceived during the previous meeting, and to take a democratic vote to see which ideas we preferred. Second…

Hang on, we all thought, what’s the point in that? It’s not like we actually have any say on what happens to the campus. It’s “For Sale,” and there’ll be no stipulation in the sales agreement that compels the buyer to respect the democratic will of the town. If its board is willing to pay the sales price, even the evil corporation of Monsanto has every right to purchase the land.

Some among us voiced those thoughts, only to be told by the moderator that “It’s important” for the town to make its desires known. Doing so may attract an investor who shares that same desire. We might not be able to say who comes to town, but we can sure invite whoever we want.

Not everyone appreciated the answer, but the moderator made us move on.

The second goal of the meeting was to use this collective crisis to draw together those who are interested in improving the status of the town and commit ourselves to working together on some kind of shared mission.

To that end, the moderator had arranged six possible ideas, culled from the previous meeting, that his team believed the town itself might commit to, ideas that would still be sound irrespective of the outcome of the campus.

I was one of the people who didn’t appreciate the moderator’s first answer, so I could barely focus on the second goal. One week later, I wish I had.

(To read a full recap of the meeting, read this newspaper article written by one of my former students — you go, Kate!)

But back to the first question. The overwhelming desire of the town is for the campus to be used by some kind of hands-on educational institution, ideally centered on the intersection of sustainability, agriculture, and the trades. It would be a mixed age institution, with classes offered to high schoolers (both foreign and domestic), as well as college age and above (both foreign and domestic).

I love that idea, and if implemented, I would support it with everything I’ve got (especially to build a bridge between the high school where I work and the institution the college would become).

With that being said, I don’t know if another “agricultural, sustainability and environmental education institute” was the most critical idea.

The one I put forward during the first meeting (which received a number of votes at the second meeting but didn’t place in the top three) was for the campus to become the home of a public mental-health facility catering specifically to teenagers.

After the vote, I accepted the results and moved on, telling myself the process was nothing more than an experiment in wishful thinking anyway.

Then tonight, a woman I knew during my college days, offered the same idea on a forum of alumni.

Two people, both of whom live or have lived in Poultney for a number of years and who have direct experience working at and/or are partnered with an individual who has worked at the college, offered their disagreement with the idea.

I just so happened to be in a chatty mood (as I so infrequently am) and decided to engage with their good-faith arguments against what I still considered to be my idea. While doing so, I became disappointed in myself, not because I was arguing on Facebook again, but because I missed my chance to defend the idea in person.

Prior to the vote, the moderator asked anyone in the audience if they wanted to speak out in support of any of the ideas on the wall. Several members did. But for some reason, I did not.

One of those reasons was the exhaustion I feel at the end of every workday. I spend six hours a day working with students between the ages of 11 and 22, 100% of whom require extra supports when it comes to their mental and emotional health. It’s a school that is not only working as hard it can to support the students who come through our doors, but to support the teachers and staff as well (as if there were a difference between our teachers and staff). Additionally, because of a continuous increase in the demand for our services, I also work as hard as I can to grow the school in every way, shape, or form, not to increase my pay, but to satisfy needs of the crisis that exists not only in the nation and the state, but also in my own town, where, despite a stable population of residents, we feel the struggle of the increase in mental and emotional health disorders among teenagers.

Every day, as rewarding as it is, is a hard day, and every day leaves me exhausted.

So I didn’t have the energy to stand up at a town meeting and tell everyone that it’s our kids — not the state’s kids — who need the support of a mental-health facility that caters specifically to teenagers.

In my years of being married to an educator in the local public schools and my years of working as an educator in the town’s two private schools, I’ve spoken of more times than we like to admit “the Poultney Wing” of the Brattleboro Retreat (one the state’s few public, residential mental-health facilities with a floor dedicated to teenagers).

It’s sometimes called “the Poultney Wing” because…

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who take regular medication for anxiety or depression or some form of psychosis?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who are so addicted to their smartphones that they suffer from withdrawal symptoms every time the device is taken away, leading to all kinds of familial and educational crises?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who have cut themselves just to feel a different kind of pain?

How many children in my town have retreated from their social lives due to the effects of bullying?

How many children in my town live with the trauma of parental addictions; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; the ramifications of an ugly divorce; a parade of wanna-be step-parents; hunger and poverty; inadequate healthcare; etc.?

How many children in my town have attempted or have regular ideations about suicide?

The national increase in mental and emotional health disorders is not a statistic. It’s a fact that my wife and I face everyday on the front lines of our schools.

Our kids need help.

Why not do everything we can to give it to them?

This town should become the first investor.
Whatever we can give, let’s give, and then let’s see who joins us.

Categories
life politics

Black Panther, Liberals, Parkland Teens, and You

One of my students, a young African-American woman, is fired up about the new Black Panther movie, but not in the way you might think. Unlike Shaun King, a well-known activist and African-American writer who “sincerely place[s] it on the level of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the birth of hip-hop, and the election of Barack Obama,” my young African-American student thinks Black Panther is trash.

I don’t want to white-mansplain her particular argument, so I’ll leave the details to her.

Instead, what I want to talk about is her existence and its relationship to Shaun King’s.

First, some context for this post.

I have another student, a young white male, who believes he is the only truly conservative person at our school. He calls us “a school full of liberals,” and he basically disdains everything we say, discounting our knowledge and our advice because we are, as he says, “liberals.”

His attitude is familiar, I’m sure. It’s the attitude that sneers the word “liberal.” It’s also (in a different way) the attitude that sneers the word “redneck.”

This attitude is born from a mindset that feels too comfortable with labels, so comfortable, in fact, that the person is not even aware they’re using them. Unfortunately, a label doesn’t do anything except provide us with permission to stop thinking.

By labeling all of his teachers as “liberals,” my “only truly conservative” student gives himself permission to not be challenged by the ideas he encounters in school. Instead of allowing new ideas to enter into his mind, he erects a barrier — a wall, if you will — to prevent all our “liberal” ideas from getting in. As you might imagine, such a strategy does not a great student make.

By any measure, my white male student would call both my African-American student and Shaun King, the African-American writer, liberals. Both argue that society has a role to play when it comes to fighting injustice, and they both prefer using progressive, radical, or even revolutionary means if necessary. In short, they are both activist soldiers in the war against oppression.

But by labeling them both as “liberals,” my white male student remains blind to the areas in which they differ, their feelings about Black Panther being just one of them.

When we paint over people with such a wide brush, we smear away everything that makes us individuals, and because of that, we lose the opportunity to engage with each other’s truly unique minds.

This is part of what the kids in Florida, and some of the kids in my own school, are trying to get across when they talk to us adults. The kids are dying, and they’re telling us, finally and firmly, to put down our labels, stop being so petty, and start actually listening to one another.

The Parkland shooting reminded us that we are living through another 9/11. And like 9/11, now is not the time to be divided.

But unlike 9/11, this wound is self-inflicted.

According to the CDC, the suicide rate among teenage girls doubled between 2005 and 2015, while the suicide rate for boys increased 30 percent over the same period (and is roughly three times higher than girls in the first place). Suicides across the whole population, meanwhile, increased 24-percent over a 15 year period (the rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged white men, by the way).

School shootings, we must remember, are often just another form of teen suicide.

In all the conversations about guns and security, we’re missing the bigger picture.

It’s not mental health. “Mental health” is just a red herring that will distract us from committing our resources in the right locations. Black women suffer from depression far greater than any other group in our population, and they are the least likely to seek professional help for it, yet black women are not committing these crimes against our schools, nor are they committing suicide at rates greater than the rest of the population. If “mental health” was the culprit, we’d see a lot less angry white boys on our screens and a lot more depressed black girls.

The culprit is whatever is causing the increase in suicides among teens. We could argue about its identity all day, but doing so would again stop us from seeing the bigger picture.

It’s time to talk to your kids, people. Time to look them in the eye, ask them how they are, and then listen.

And if you know a kid whose parents definitely won’t be doing that, then know that the rest of us are counting on you. You are the representative of the rest of us. Help us by helping that young, emotionally abandoned kid.

And then, after you’ve done it once, do it again, and again, and again, and don’t stop doing it until you know the kid is going to be okay. Because more than guns, more than “mental health,” it will be the helping, caring adult who will stop this.

If we can’t come together on gun control, can we at least come together on that?

And hey, if you don’t quite feel up to it, then at least take the kid to go see Black Panther. Because unlike my student, I thought it was a kick ass movie.

Categories
life politics religion & atheism

The Path to the Dark Side

I’m trying to understand the other side of the argument. I truly am. I don’t believe that any sane person can witness the latest carnage of school children and say the status quo is acceptable.

Which means every sane person agrees that *something* has to change.

I can only imagine three outcomes to the current national debate. The first is to put armed officials in and around our schools to defend the students against all attackers. The second is to put meaningful restrictions on the right of American citizens to bear arms. The third is some combination of the two.

I think most sane people would agree that, regardless of which outcome our elected representatives decide upon, we need to make further changes if we’re to create a meaningful reduction in *attempted* schoolhouse shootings.

Because this is not just about whether we should or should not restrict the private ownership of guns. It’s also about whatever it is that creates angry, young, white men.

I’m not talking about the stereotypical Trump voter or the horrifying rise of white nationalism (which, for the record, is horrible because, in this nation, whites already possess the majority, so all white nationalism can do is further oppress the oppressed, as opposed to black nationalism, which is more about a rising up, rather than a pushing down, but I digress…).

I’m talking about the angry, young, white men who sit back and strategize the optimum method for murdering their peers, and then have the discipline and wherewithal to follow through with their plan.

These are not children acting on a whim.

Last week, in my hometown, the police arrested an angry, young, white man for attempted aggravated murder, attempted first-degree murder, and attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He had been planning for weeks, if not months, to go into his former high school and just start shooting. He was not arrested on his way to do the act. He had let his plan slip to some of his peers, and he called an old classmate of his who happened to be in the Parkland school last week when the shooting happened, and he asked her to describe to him in detail exactly what happened in the school. It was partly based on this phone call, and because an observant mother of one of his peers, that the boy was arrested before he could act.

The boy confessed to planning the massacre, and he told the police there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it. If he got out of jail, he was going to try again.

Right now, the motive seems shady at best — there may have been some bullying, but it’s not exactly clear from the public evidence — but it’s not even the motive that I want to talk about.

It’s the planning. We saw it at Columbine, at Newtown, and at Parkland. It’s the weeks and months of planning.

These things take time. They take price comparisons for weapons, repeated forays for target practice, and pages and pages of writings or hours and hours of video.

But it’s not just the planning. It’s that moment, weeks or months prior, when they decide they’re going to plan. What was perhaps once a flight of fancy becomes a conscious and deliberate plan.

Why?

The flight of fancy comes, I think, from the media. I don’t doubt that violent movies and violent video games give us permission to more vividly imagine our most violent thoughts, thoughts provoked by current and past events in our collective history, which allows perhaps once forbidden thoughts to become palatable to our moral sensibilities, themselves shaped by generational changes in the processes of parenting, education, and the worship of religion.

But none of those things cause a flight of fancy to suddenly transform into a conscious and deliberate plan.

So what does? What makes imaginary violence turn real?

In one short story I wrote for grad school, my angry, young, white, male protagonist dragged a white pregnant woman guns-a-blazing into a hospital where he forced a doctor to oversee the birth of the woman’s child, all while fighting off a swat team of police. When the child is born with black skin, the protagonist looks at the woman disappointingly, then shoots the baby in the face.

(PS: My advisor that semester was black, and I valued his opinion immensely).

There’s a lot of psychology in that story (especially when I think back to how much of it was written on a whim), but at no point during or after the writing of that story have I ever worried about whether I would enact such violence. The very notion of it is unthinkable to me, despite my ability to imagine it in emotionally resonant detail.

Why did my objectively horrible flight of fancy not turn into a conscious and deliberate plan? What, in my own upbringing, did my family, my society, my culture get right?

It wasn’t respect. My style of conversation can be incredibly disrespectful, turning sharp and personal in sometimes selfishly obtuse ways, and I’m not immune to lashing out physically at those who annoy me.

It wasn’t hard work either. Ask anyone, I’m among the laziest people they know.

It wasn’t discipline. I disobeyed my mother and father plenty during childhood, and I continue to disobey them in many ways today. The detentions and in-school suspensions I received in high school didn’t deter me from doing the same things over and over. The failing grades, the high-interest credit cards, the obscene student loan debt — there’s virtually no discipline here.

But something, *something,* stops me from turning my violent flights of fancy into a conscious and deliberate plan.

It’s not fear. As an atheist, I like to think of myself as relatively impervious to fear. Oh, there’s anxiety galore, but anxiety is not fear. As a child who grew up with an insane phobia of dogs, I’ve known true fear, and fear does not stop me from turning violent thoughts into violent actions.

So what is it?

Whatever it is. That’s what we need to work on in our children.

We don’t need to remove violent video games or stop production on violent movies. Rap, punk, heavy metal: none of them can cause a child to deliberately plan and carry out a massacre. Our ability to imagine violence is not the problem, and if we remove it from our media, all we’ll do is perpetuate oppression, violence being a sometimes necessary response to oppression, and thus being sometimes necessary to imagine.

Nor do we need to put God back in the schools. I live my existence without the fear of God and without the lived sense of His mercy, and yet still, I don’t plan and deliver a hellfire of violence upon the innocents of the world. God may be good, but He’s not good for everybody; whatsmore, He’s definitely not necessary.

So what is it then? What do we need to change in these angry, young, white men? They don’t need more respect, more discipline, more fear, or more God, and they don’t need to reduce their consumption of violent media. None of those things are required to *not* turn their flights of fancy into real, deliberate violence.

But what is?

The answer is so simple I didn’t even notice it until now, even though I’ve shared posts about all throughout the past week.

We simply need to turn angry, young, white men into plain young, white men.

Stop the anger, and you stop the massacre of the innocents.