We've Got to Stop Scaring Our Kids to Death
After that second plane hit the Twin Towers, I did the same thing as everybody else in America; I stood in front of our television in shock, watching people covered in ash running for cover. I saw men in dress suits jumping out of 80-story windows, spinning their arms like swimmers. I memorized replays of impact, of fireballs, of collapse, and of terror.
I was young back then and unaccustomed to evil of that magnitude falling on my homeland. You've seen people standing beside car accidents on the highway, dazed and staring into the wreckage, looking for an explanation. That's how it was for me that day. Regular life stopped, and it wasn’t until Laura Bush came over the airwaves and grabbed me by the shoulders that I realized my kids were seeing everything I was seeing. I thank God for her and how she spoke to young mothers that day. She asked us to turn off the televisions. She reminded us to be the adults, to hug our babies, to be strong, and to help our littles go on with their lives, even in the midst of disaster. After all, part of war is refusing to give evil men more than they have won.
My daughter was not quite two that fall, and when I looked down to see how she was doing, her eyes were huge and sober with confusion. She rubbed her face, and in a worried toddler voice she said, “Eyes! Eyes! Got somefing in deir eyes! Need a water an wash it!”
Photo Credit: Gulnara Samilova / Associated Press
I realized then that she was talking about those people who had escaped the towers, faces caked with soot and dust. She knew from my expression that something terrible had happened. She didn’t understand the details, but she understood the fear.
My daughter is now 16, and she’s part of a generation of young adults who have never known a world without terror. When my girl makes plans, she speaks like most of the teenagers I know. "If America is still...." or "If our economy is still..."
She's not alone. I teach high school students every day, and I'm telling you, the heaviness of our time is in the bones of young people today. They read dystopian books like The Hunger Games or the Divergent series, in part, because those stories give them a framework for life in a devastated world. They read books like The Fault in Our Stars looking for excuses to gather their rosebuds while they may, because it's hard to wait for a tomorrow that everybody says is doomed.
These kids aren't the first generation to face trouble, of course. My parents did Cold War nuke drills, hiding under school desks, and their peers died horrible deaths in Vietnam. My generation watched the AIDS epidemic creep across the country and beautiful babies with swollen bellies and flies on their mouths die in the African famine. Propaganda films like The Day After stole months of good sleep out of my childhood.
When I think of the 80's, I think of violent music, and acid rain, and apathy, and abortions... hundreds of thousands of my peers ... people who would have been my friends... secretly killed by their own mothers. My parents watched Father Knows Best while my generation watched Rosanne Barr grab her crotch during the national anthem.
We had it bad, but these teens today have it worse. They have all that mess plus a society where grown women brag about the number of babies they've killed (#shoutyourabortion), where grown men demand the right to go pee pee in little girl bathrooms, and where Presidential candidates get huffy on national television about the size of their man parts. We shame our teenagers for not understanding patriotism after pulling the rug out from under this country. We shame them for being atheists when they've never known a Catholic church without sex scandals or an evangelical church without political agendas. We shame them for sleeping around when their peers aren't just sneaking off behind the bleachers to have sex (which would be harmful enough), they are sneaking off to have sex without caring about the people they are having sex with. Sex is an opiate. Stress relief. A thing animals do. And why not? For years their parents have had boyfriends and girlfriends over spending the night because Mommy and Daddy explain that they have a "right to be happy, too." I know so many teens who can't even come home to a decent hot meal around the dinner table after school to talk about their day with a mother and father who act like grown ups.
Photo Credit: MorgueFile by "taylorschlades"
Porn isn't hidden under mattresses, it's on phones, two clicks away from everything these kids ever see. They can don't blush about anything, because their generation talks openly about everything people ever do with human bodies. They laugh about masturbation, and menstruation, and boobs, and orgasms even though they are just kids, just kids, just kids. And their laughter is sour and dismissive, because nothing is sacred. Nothing is tender. Nothing is saved for the future. The magic has been taken out of all the world, and it is now flattened, reduced to atoms and animal impulses. They are bored with the roller coaster, because they've never known life on land.
These kids were babies when those planes hit those towers, and babies when Harris and Klebold shot up Columbine, and babies when Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky got it together. Their souls grew thick callouses fast; they aren't shocked by anything, and the best they can squeeze out of their world is cheap, and lonely, and empty, and temporary. We make fun of them for caring about "likes" on social media, but what do they have to show them they matter?
They have a world without truth, a world without hope, a world without dignity. Their pockets are full of a couple of scientific and technological whiz-bangs, but they've lost decent music and good poetry, lost plot, lost language, lost God. The smartest dudes of their time are categorical scientists, or deconstructionists, or killers of the deep aesthetic. They are post meta-narrative, post authoritative, post joy, post-post-post anything dignified or meaningful or even human.
Photo Credit: MorgueFile by "greyerbaby"
Some of those kids are now voting in their first election ever, and they have to choose between a DC shyster and poop-throwing, angry, old baboon. They see us scrambling around, looking to Glenn Beck and Matt Walsh (who are freaking out), and Christian commentators (who are freaking out), and Christian apologists (who are freaking out). We get online and post memes, and slap fights, and apocalyptic rants. We cry out for Jesus to come back, as if the trumpet sounding to get the chosen out of here could negate the value of everything eternal that would be left behind.
Fear has done a number on us, folks, and it's done a number on our kids. For their sake, we've got to look away from the carnage long enough to get our bearings so that we aren't reactionary. We've got to face this present trouble with faith.
Fear has done a number on us, folks, and it's done a number on our kids. For their sake, we've got to look away from the carnage long enough to get our bearings so that we aren't reactionary. We've got to face this present trouble with faith.
Of course there's a place for grown-ups to have emotions. It's alright for us to acknowledge our worry and disappointment. But just like Laura Bush told me to shut off the television so I could focus on leading my kids through a terrible day, we can't let those emotions lead us. As we are honest, we also have to be courageous for the sake of those coming behind us.
Our kids have been sucking on the cold witch's tit of dread ever since they could walk and string two words together. That fear has soaked into their lives so deep, it's infected everything. They don't know a world without it. It's hurt them enough already.
This is why we have to step out of the cultural terrorism that's yanking us all by the throats and begin to offer more than dire warnings. Adrenaline-driven frenzies are not helping anyone. We have to offer vision, and beauty, and purpose. We have to demonstrate a life worth living for.
Sure, we should fight where battles need to be fought, but we have to fight those battles in context of a bigger goal and a bigger security. It's time to plant ourselves firmly in the trajectory of our faith and began demonstrating vision for the beauty of the gospel. It's time to let the goodness of Jesus contrast against the darkness we see now in the world. It's time to embody virtues like respect, gentleness, patience, discretion, honesty, creativity, tenacity, and courage. It's time to show our kids what a rich, full, joy-driven, hopeful, meaningful life looks like right here. Right now.
Sure, we should fight where battles need to be fought, but we have to fight those battles in context of a bigger goal and a bigger security. It's time to plant ourselves firmly in the trajectory of our faith and began demonstrating vision for the beauty of the gospel. It's time to let the goodness of Jesus contrast against the darkness we see now in the world. It's time to embody virtues like respect, gentleness, patience, discretion, honesty, creativity, tenacity, and courage. It's time to show our kids what a rich, full, joy-driven, hopeful, meaningful life looks like right here. Right now.
J.A. Smith has written about the importance of helping people understand that they are thirsty for what is beautiful. He says,
"The telos to which our love is aimed is not a list of ideas of proposition or doctrines; it is not a list of abstract, disembodied concepts or values. Rather, the reason that this vision of the good life moves us is because it is a more affective, sensible, even aesthetic picture of what the good life looks like. A vision of the good life captures our hearts and imaginations not by providing a set of rules or ideas, but by painting a picture of what it looks like for us to flourish and live well. This is why such pictures are communicated most powerfully in stories, legends, myths, plays, novels and films rather than dissertations, messages, and monographs. Because we are affective before we are cognitive (and even while we are cognitive), visions of the good get inscribed in us by means that are commensurate with our primarily affective, imaginative nature. This isn’t to say that the cognitive or propositional is a completely foreign register for us (if it were, this book would be an exercise in futility!); however, it doesn’t get into our (noncognitive) bones in the same way or with the same effect. The cognitive and propositional is easily reduced and marginalized as just more ‘blah-blah-blah’ when our hearts and imaginations are captured by a more compelling picture of the good life,”
If this is true, friends, it's possible that all of this chaos and gloom provide the greatest opportunity America has ever known. What if our job is to demonstrate Christ's love and hope in this very context of darkness?
I remember taking a tour of Mammoth Cave when I was a kid. In the middle of the tunnel, the guide let us experience complete darkness, darkness so thick you could almost feel it. Then he lit a single match. This little light of mine.
Photocredit: Morgue File by "Alvimann"
Clearly, our spiritual enemy is trying to make us despair. What if we refuse to give in to that and trust God instead? What if we praise? What if we create? What if we turn our energy to rejoicing in the love of God, in finding new ways to express his offer to a hurting world... new ways to be hopeful, peaceful, generous... new ways to believe?
Photo Credit: Morguefile by "Domas"
Because no matter what shakes in any party, our God reigns. No matter what leaders disappoint us, our God reigns. No matter how injustice, corruption, animalism, and violence infect this country we love, our God reigns.
We have access to the Light of the World, to Living Water that rises up and rolls over our edges, that can pour upon the drought of our thirsty world and fill the cracks of a desolate nation. If we have been chosen to live in difficult times, so be it. Let's keep enough space between the disaster and our hearts to keep our hearts. Let's know what's happening and help with it, but not be driven by trouble like a leaf in the wind. No matter what our enemy has done, let's not give him more ground than he has taken. Fortitude is contagious, so for the sake of the next generation, let's have the focus to sing in prison.