See the Butterfly

Our little town, like so many other towns across the country, found itself investigating a threat left on the wall in one of the bathrooms at our high school.

I was angry. Irritated was probably a better word. I learned about the situation via Facebook. Postings led me to the local police department’s page. It was evident that the information had been circulating through the community – kids, schools, law enforcement – since the previous day.

From the school proper, I could find nothing. No email, no text, no post. Parents get regular texts from the schools – late buses, fundraisers, events, etc. But nothing concerning this. I responded to the Facebook post asking if there had been updates, if anyone had heard anything from the schools and was there any information on why they had been silent. There had been nothing, but many parents felt the same way I did. If we had not checked social media, if our kids hadn’t said something, we wouldn’t have known one thing about the threat to the school.

I made the decision to keep my children home. All of them. It made me feel better to be able to look at them all day while the school and the authorities figured out what they were going to do. Do I think they were in actual danger? No. I trust the work and, more importantly, give a shit of our police force. Have I been wrong before? Lots. It’s just a few days of school and it made me feel better. I was good with a bit of extra.

For the record, the school did send out the “there has been a threat identified and the school system and the police department are handling it” notification – an hour after I would have normally dropped my kid off at school.

Mid morning I was contacted by a local television news reporter. She saw my comment on Facebook and would I be interested in meeting with her for an interview on the parents’ perspective. I originally agreed. She would find someone to talk to, might as well be me. After a lot of thought, an unsuccessful attempt to contact the school principal for guidance, and a successful attempt to hash it out with a friend, I declined. The reporter asked if I was concerned about anonymity. I obviously am not. I am concerned about being, at best, useless and, at worst, harmful.

I explained to her that I didn’t think I was the right person. I didn’t really know a whole lot except what had brought about my frustration (the time of the notification). And even that, I doubted but admitted, may have a good reason. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know anything except I knew where my children were and I was super thankful for social media that morning. In a highly emotional situation like this, what could I possibly add that was of value in a news segment that would be short, constructed by someone other than myself, and out of my control when edited and produced? Nothing. I just wasn’t interested.

But I decided I would write about it, if only to sort my own thoughts, document the events, and maybe start a conversation that goes further than the divisive 24 hour news cycle flag planting and party protection.

Let me be clear. The loss of life is tragic. I can’t even begin to imagine. I won’t even being to imagine. The idea rips my heart out. I don’t have any answers, I only have wonders and opinions. I happen to think that’s an okay start. I am smart, thoughtful, and fallible. I am far from a perfect mother and I do not have perfect children. None of that is lost on me.

I am not discussing guns per se in this post. If the conversation afterwards goes in that direction, I am fine with it. It is a topic I rather enjoy. But as long as gun ownership remains inextricably tied to violence among our children, the children lose. They don’t have the lobby or the money to gain priority in the discussion. They are merely used as pawns on both sides of a debate that is exploiting their position as cherished and expending them as emotional capital.

I am not discussing mental health as a diagnosis or health care accessibility. Mental health is supremely important and has been bastardized as a buzz word by those who care little about health and more about excuse, justification, and vindication. Healthcare, a natural follow on to the mental health discussion, is important as well. However, I refer back to the gun paragraph and you can substitute “healthcare.” The truth is the same.

I am not discussing parenting, the lack thereof, the definition of a snowflake, who’s momma needs to beat who’s ass, which church prays the best so that God will come down and fix it, which video game, movie premiere, actor, rapper, heavy metal, satan worshiper, or Elvis, sent morality into the toilet, screentime, organic foods, role of teachers, the competency of the police force, school uniforms, family dinner time, reading time with children, organized playdates, bad moms, absent fathers, failed education system, the current or past administrations, or helicopter, tiger, free range, attachment parenting strategies.

Then fuck April, what are you going to talk about?

I am going to talk about understanding nothing happens in a vacuum, it isn’t just one thing. It is dangerous to ignore the damage we are allowing our children to shoulder while the grown ups fight about god, guns, discipline, and government, feeling better and all comfy in our righteous indignation.

One of the most eye opening and soul crushing things I did yesterday was read the hundreds of comments posted by folks concerning the threat at our school and schools like it. They ran the typical gamut of all the things I said earlier that I am not talking about. If I were to believe what I read, my little town is filled with torches, pitchforks, and people who believe that the systematic forcing of religion solves all woes. What I actually chose to believe is that parents are simply scared for the safety of their children.

It also became clear that there were two distinct camps present. The Everybody Sucks group and the Circle the Wagons crew. Everybody Sucks had plenty of blame to go around – the school administrators, law enforcement, parents, etc. Circle the Wagons defended these same entities at all cost and offered them up as blameless and holy, unable to be questioned or considered. Both evoked the cause of the children on their behalf. Neither acknowledged that they both had value to bring and ideas to learn. We were all looking for one thing, one reason, one virus that we could cure and make the whole thing go away. Most of us were not engaged in discussion. That’s not the way any of this works.

Look, I am well aware that every single generation has claimed differences from the ones before and after it. “Back in my day” is a thing because it is a thing. That’s called life. That’s called progress. But if we continue to insist that all kids today need is a good dose of everything that we got back in the day, we are deluding ourselves.

Seriously, unless I got to keep all my knowledge and experience, you couldn’t pay me to go back in time and be a teenager again. However, I would do that shit for free and with bells on before I would agree to be a teenager today.

This is just my personal experience but I can’t imagine it is so very different than most. We had cliques, popular kids, nerds, dolts, mainstream, outcasts, over achievers, slackers, jocks, and all the rest – just like the generation before and just like the generations after. We had the rumor mills and bullies. You got talked about. Everybody got talked about. Some folks got picked on. All of this happened in the confines of our community. This happened to your face or close behind your back and the fire eventually died because honestly, kids attention spans haven’t changed much. You got to home, hide in your room, maybe ditch school, let the shit die, and then go on about your business. Maybe you had to take it to the next level and meet in the DCT parking lot after school to knock each other around a bit. And it sucked because you’re a kid and you don’t know all the things you don’t know and growing up is just hard.

Today, there is no quarter. There are no geographic borders. There are no identifiable whispers. The onslaught is relentless. One thing, one misstep and your kid in Tampa is getting harassed from snot nosed teenagers in Spokane. And it never goes away. It gets shared and reshared and retweeted and reposted and instead of people getting bored and the fire fanning out, these kids are working in time zones shifts to stoke that sucker so that it stays ablaze.

The expectations are higher. That prank you pulled when you toilet papered the teacher’s desk? Super funny in your little town. But what do you have to do to compete with the 5 billion YouTube videos watched every. Single. Day. And sure, you teach your kids that competition isn’t important, that the internet is a virtual playground of fiction and bad ideas. But they are children. I can’t begin to tell you how many bad ideas happened when I was a kid because one guy’s truck did a thing and so the other guys had to figure out what to do next.

The ability to find the thing that makes you special is harder. And teenagers need to feel special. It was hard enough to achieve that in a school of a couple thousand. These kids are now trying to figure out how to make it when they are in contact with hundreds of thousands. As parents we do the best we can, but we have been sucked into the same damn thing. Every mom I know has had that moment where she has compared herself to the chick she found on the internet and spent days questioning if she was even worthy of a uterus. How do we expect our children to do any better?

Being a kid is just harder. That isn’t anybody’s fault. It just is. As such, being a parent is harder. Again, no fault, it just is. And there’s no handbook for it because our parents never came close to anything like this. My mother thanks baby Jesus in earnest that all her children are already grown. That woman is one of the best mommas on the planet and even she doesn’t want the job today. She is a great listener and we talk about stuff, but she will be the first to admit she has no real advice for me because she has no clue where to begin.

Nobody is discussing the fact that we are the first generation of parents that are tasked with both navigating who we are in relationship to all the technological advances while simultaneously having to raise children to be able navigate it as well.

And the truth is, the adults aren’t doing it very well. We are real assholes online. From dogging the mom’s outfit choice to the dad smoking while waiting in the car line, and all manner of judgement, name calling, rhetoric engaging, bullshit memes, and satire articles posted as fact and proof, we are a generation of cyber assholes.

The problem with that is that there isn’t a kid internet and an asshole adult internet. It is the same internet and our kids see us. They see us unable to engage in intelligent conversation. They see us resort to bullshit made up facts, rumors, and irrelevant character assassination. They watch us judge people we don’t know and assign motives to people we have never had a conversation with. They watch us. And they imitate us. And they hurt people.

Our children are dying trying to find real connection, real belonging, real fucking real. They aren’t mature enough to understand the nuances of fact and facade. They aren’t experienced enough to separate the genuine from the charlatan. They are looking for us to show them how to create real relationships. But we are so busy protecting our scared cows and condemning those who don’t think exactly like us, that we have forgotten how to do it ourselves.

Look, I am not saying we are bad people. We aren’t. We’ve just forgotten how to have conversations or that they are even important. We have forgotten that thoughts go deeper than a headline, bumper sticker, or squirrel meme. We pimped out our MySpace and got the idea that somehow substituted for having coffee with a real person.

But I have faith in us. I have faith in our ability to build relationships that accomplish positive progress. And I really believe in coffee.