teenagers – Fluid Imagination

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.

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.