What’s a Teenager to Think?

     I hear that 1968 was a troubling year to be a teenager. The Smithsonian Magazine called it, “The Year that Shattered America.” Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The Vietnam war made LBJ a devil in the eyes of young people across America and around the world. Protesters outside the Democratic National Convention were dispersed with teargas. 

     Today we are a nation that can’t decide whether to honor, graffiti, or ignore the past. We can’t decide whether we want the rule of law, either. If it means police brutality, we don’t. If it means the end of riots, we do. What would Charles Dickens say? On another note...

    Will there be another George Floyd?

    Teenagers, like so many of the rest of us have to work incredibly hard to find a firm place to stand. There’s no one way to describe it. Confusion abounds. If you’re poor, you see it one way. If you’re rich, you see it another. Black students will see it different from white. What about Latinos? I don’t hear much talk about immigration at the moment. The world teens are inheriting is male vs female; woke vs asleep; liberal vs conservative; capitalist vs socialist; Democrat vs Republican; Christian vs Secularist; city vs country; country vs hip hop; cat vs dog, and dog eat world. There are even people who believe the earth is flat and that the Apollo space missions were a hoax.

     Increasingly, a student looking at the smorgasbord of ideas gets the hunch that she is expected to see everything on a scale. She must either choose all the options that are associated with the left or the right. There is a widening chasm between them, similar to the all or nothing approach that rent the country in two over slavery. If she thinks this is unfair and tries to find a middle position she runs the risk of being labeled a defector from one camp or the other. We need her, more than ever, to have the courage to step into the middle and listen...really listen.

     Politics used to have reasonable boundaries. It used to be that dinner conversations with polite friends would avoid the topics of religion or politics. What now can we talk about today that excludes them? Are we nearing the point where choosing a dog or cat for a pet means we are liberal or conservative? Can Republicans be vegan? 

     If I were a teenager today, I would look long and hard for the most stable thing I could find in the sea of ideas. With storms and turmoil all around, I would look for something that has stood the test of time. Not everything new is better; not everything old is either. Just because some voices shout louder and longer doesn’t make them right. If an otherwise trusty car has a faulty headlight don’t scrap the whole thing, learn to fix or improve what’s broken and keep it on the road.