In my ministry years I necessarily worked with kids of all ages. Because the congregations were small, maybe only a couple of dozen people on a Sunday morning, the hour together was often as much spent in discussion as in conventional services. The sermon was only the beginning point with interspersed songs (not even necessarily hymns since we were UU) and meditations (resistance to “prayer”). People attended as families -- except for disruptive little kids who had a program for them elsewhere -- and the teens had good things to say. They were kids who read books, who were computer-savvy, who succeeded, who would go to good colleges, and so on. The top three or four percent of kids across the country. They were generous, sensitive, compassionate, dutiful -- everything admirable. But when I looked at them I saw vulnerability.
The vulnerability of the entitled.
They think there are answers to life. They think that adults should present both goals and means and that they should be effective. They talk about how they “have a right.” If their assumptions qre challenged -- even by some video exposé -- they’d go tail over teakettle with sorrow and indignation. They were like those 19th century sons of gentry in Britain who never hesitated to plunge into the jungle or desert to have adventures, never expecting anything so terrible to happen to them that the power of their status couldn’t pull them out. On the one hand, they were invaluable explorers -- on the other hand, they were miserable saps. How about those Portland privileged kids who died in a snow cave, trapped by a storm on Mt. Hood because they doubted the weather forecast? How about those kids who recently went into darkest Africa to confront an African warlord? They stood there in their best UN manner while the warlord considered whether it would be better to get money out of them some way or just cook them down for soup.
A guy who works with cult “victims” says that when he started out, most of the people who were sucked in by cults were 18 - 24 year old males. The assumption was that it was an adolescent thing. But he says that now the typical cult prey is a “baby boomer.” Same guys, just older. Now they are hitting their fifties and the ground is caving under their feet. Marriage, success, kids? What was it about this cohort? Their parents told them they could have whatever they wanted: if you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way, and here’s a check. Then came the limits -- which felt like failure -- and then came the shame, which was the gateway to cults. Which is a kind of xenophobia, closing out all the danger, the opposite of the earlier strategy, but one that leads to emotional asphyxiation.
Today’s newspaper suggests that this same demographic group represents a rising suicide rate. Not alienated teens, but rather baby boomers who can’t handle the disparity between what they thought about the world and what it turned out to be like. The ones who abandoned their families when the going got tough.
The Good Men Project http://goodmenproject.com is lately throwing up all sorts of info about the vulnerability of boys and men. Priority is given to male issues -- that’s the point of their project. But what I’m talking about here is not gender-identified vulnerability but about prosperity-triggered vulnerability, the main mechanism being the assumption of entitlement. The last time I taught (I only lasted a couple of months) I was horrified by the exploitation between the haves and the have-nots. Kids in high school who “have” try to crush those who do not. In a small town the dynamics are much clearer than they are in the city. I wasn’t seeing arousal addiction -- I was seeing arousal aversion. Insistence on the sure thing: guaranteed, money back. Only the rebels were after the thrill, the rush, the experiment just to see what would happen. They will save all the rest of us.
My retirement is in a little village on the prairie because not much happens here. At least that’s the complaint of the kids. In the Seventies when I was reading a lot of psych, there was an essay about daring men who took risks. The idea was that a human being has to have a certain amount of stability to keep from getting their heads scrambled and their example was some guy who did amazing things -- parachuting from outer space or some such -- which challenged even one’s sensory equipment. Then the writer pointed out that this guy who took risks was repetitious in many ways: diet, wardrobe, the same old beater car, same modest house, and so on. That’s me. It won’t attract many teenagers. But that’s because they can’t see my mental life, which is sort of parachuting INTO outer space, defying gravity, cruisin' the cosmos. “Sameness” is the means: risk is the end. Without it, survival means nothing.
The teens and pre-teens in this country who have no place to sleep, the same smelly dirty clothes to wear, nothing to eat except what’s in dumpsters, infections and conditions that blur together into simple misery, are tough kids. They’re smart. They’re hip. They’re better psychologists than a lot of counselors -- at least when they have enough calories and brain function to think. Because the ones who aren’t tough have died. The fantasies in games and movies that the prosperous kids buy with platinum credit cards are the realities for them.
One of the ways that evolution happens is that a population that is geographically separated -- usually by being on an island or in a valley -- develops uniquely because of the pressures on it, both push and pull. This has historically been a matter of millennia, but that was looking at physical changes. The Galapagos effect. Nowadays our populations AND their cultures have been stirred almost to the bottom of the pot. So what seems to be happening is the chaotic reconciliation of cultures without regard for their location. The economic bottom is far more able to cope with this than the economic top, which can afford to isolate itself in a way that prevents change -- use violence if necessary. We can expect the bottoms to prevail. They know violence. It’s already happening.
My daily newspaper has gone right wing. It tells me I’m too old to commit suicide. (Born earlier than the Boomers.) It’s the media that is driven by arousal addiction, which it tries to impose on all the rest of us because it is the key to advertising profit. (Look at me, look at me!) The reporters are practically teenagers and paid almost nothing. EVERYTHING arouses them, to the point where there is no coherence, only some detail that caught their eye. They are edited by old people, too old to commit suicide, too afraid of losing control to retire. NOTHING arouses them. They are totally vulnerable and they know it, so their whole focus is righteous invulnerability, which means they only will publish what supports that. And THAT is their vulnerability. It will get them if simple time doesn’t kill them first. If they aren’t already “got” by their corporation masters. Their strength is brittle and blind.
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