Home Alone, On-Line

by Donna Schaper

The Amherst junior high was evacuated due to what started as a bomb scare and proved to be a bomb. With many other parents, I wish I could be more surprised.

There is a certain fit to the event. It fits my discomfiture and discombobulation and dismay at youth today. Part of me feels like breaking out into a chorus of "what's the matter with kids today?" but I would be too deeply embarrassed. I was an outrageous teenager. I know what these kids are up to -- they are trying to grow up and get noticed. They can't use the simpler stuff I used, like sex, drugs, and rock and roll, so they are using stuff just the other side of my experience. The effect is brilliant: call me alienated.

As my junior high child puts it, "Stop talking about it. I didn't do anything wrong. And nobody got hurt. Leave it alone." I wish I could obey his denial-laden orders. I can't. I access reality the "old-fashioned" way. When you go slowly towards this one, it just opens and opens and opens and scares and scares and scares.

Stimulation Bombardment

My children and your children are being targeted as a major market for cultural garbage. Stupid sex, stupid violence, all for a small, addicting monthly fee. They think school is boring, because school is boring compared to what they can find with the click of a finger. Translate boring to stimulation bombardment and you know what they are talking about. At home, alone, on-line, they pay a small fee and are given a complete acculturation to a world their parents can't see, sometimes can't even find, and certainly "disapprove" of. The possibilities for adolescent privacy are much more interesting today than they were out behind the barn.

We have been joking about the firecracker we found in our son's wallet. Maybe we should replace it with a condom. He wouldn't find that funny. Neither, actually, would we. Except sex has surrounded him as a child in a way that it did not surround me. He can't even rebel with it. His TV time is deeply, almost hideously sexualized. There are no people in it.

We also would have hoped to keep our son from going to war, but he goes to boot camp at $59.99 per package as often as we let him. There he learns the tools of modern war by pushing little buttons and killing what he swears aren't real enemies on screen. And we pay for his training.

As we open the package and search for the sources of the junior high school bomb scare, we come straight to the children who could have been ours--whose lives are seriously harmed by their apparently innocent mistake. The innocence of four children making two bombs--a pipe bomb and a bottle bomb-- from gun powder, is about the only real thing in whole mix.

One of the dozens of parents I have talked to this weekend, one said they "didn't want those kids back in my kid's school." Can we really dare to think those four were particularly evil? Children whose innocence resulted in stupidity which resulted in real danger? My son has looked up bomb building on the net. It took my husband 30 seconds to get 30 pages of highly instructive print-outs on the same subject.

I would love to blame the parents or blame their kids. That could let me get a little more sleep. But, now that we've had pill-popping by the cheer leading squad in Woburn and marijuana by the high school basketball squad in Amherst and bombs at the junior high, dare we think that some children are that different from other children?

The Enemy

The enemy is not a half dozen or less families or kids. Our enemy is the economic culture of our children, where they are precociously being led to a major marketing coup.

I grilled my 13 year old most of Saturday about what really happened and is happening. He keeps saying things like "I wouldn't be that stupid, Mom." I didn't think those kids could be that stupid either. The world, which ought to be their friend, is actually their enemy. The kids are targeted less by bombs than by the major new markets. They are being bombed and bombarded by them.

I threatened to put all our TVs and computers out onto the curb. If I didn't think I could be put in jail for censorship, I'd go all the way and unplug them. What I know is that we tried that-—only to find them dazzled by their friend's equipment and not even talking to their already over-stimulated friends when they went to visit. They just pushed their buttons. Now we have all the buttons at home. They desire deeply to push them.

What do I prefer and want? I want the children to have a friendly world. I want forgiveness for the kids who acted out the markets' deepest fantasies for them. I want the class of 2001 and 2002 to remember this day as a wake up call for all of us, parents, kids and community.

The Rev. Donna Schaper is the Area UCC Minister for Western Massachusetts with 125 churches in her charge. Her upcoming (September) book from Innisfree Press will be Sabbath Sense: A Spiritual Antidote for the Overworked.

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