What are the following names associated with? Mark Barton, Seung-Hui Cho, Robert Hawkins, Joseph Pallipurath, Terry Ratzmann, Norman Afzal Simons, Robert Stewart, Bryan Uyesugi, and Jeff Weise are not just names. These are the names of people whose caused death, pain and destruction to themselves and others. They once were young people with ambitions, hopes and dreams. They also had fears and they may have been very isolated, and lonely. They engineered a flatline. They devastated neighborhoods. Many are still recovering from the shock and awfulness of their calculated deeds.
What about us? Which way are we going? Are we any better than them? Look at how we are treating our children and young people in care, in the juvenile justice system, in our schools and in society. And yet we say that the youth of today is it. The children and youth are special, today. They are no worse and no better than youth through the ages. It just looks worse from our aging perspective.
Young people need roots that can anchor them firmly in the social fabric and family systems. These roots are strengthened and nurtured by and through our interaction with them. This is how they learn to attribute meaning to the lives of others and to their own lives. Our interactions with each other establish rituals or meaning making systems. We connect with each other though healthy growth producing relationships. However, their reality might still be very painful.
A young person might offend by stealing something from others. Immediately this young person is a delinquent, gets a criminal record and gets a punishment that fits the crime. What have we done through our penal justice system? We inflict pain. We let them feel. We let them sweat. We let them truckle. Oh, and by the way some of our enlightened ones will protest and say that we use the principles of restorative justice. That may just mean that we have addressed the restoration of the victim. It does not mean that we have spent an ounce of energy restoring the perpetrator.
Many of the young people that I have worked with simply had communication problems. They had deficient cognitive abilities. They could not describe, explain or define their personal stuff. They might just not have known what was going on. In trying to create safe spaces for themselves they create a danger places for others. Many young people are so used to having nothing that they do not even know that they can want something. Many of our youth are lonely.
We have not yet learned to skillfully distinguish between maladaptive and deficient behavior. Our kneejerk reaction is always the same irrespective of which one is the driver. Can we at least try to engage our children and young people before the disaster they are contemplating becomes a real tragedy?
The homes and neighborhoods where they are coming from might not be the cause of their alternativeness. It may just be associated with what they are going through. Many neighborhoods are flatline neighborhoods because the risk factors annihilate the protective elements. There are just more bad things to contend with than good things to connect with in some homes and communities.
Let’s stop pretending that we are seeking to do the right thing and to seek justice for them. We are just covering our own behinds. We are just putting them away so that we can have peace. We are just medicating them to numb their senses and to delay the problems hoping that it will disappear.
Many minds manage marvelous solutions. We have tried the one eyed-approach. We have used our all seeing-eye approach. We now know that we are not better than them, maybe just a tad more resilient. Maybe we just had a few more resources. Maybe there was just that one caring person. Blaming them and shaming them is not a solution. I believe that diversity is another possible answer. Let’s put the minds of diverse people together to engage in problem solving. We have to include our young people in any dialogue about them. We cannot talk about them without them and hope to be successful.
