A 20-year old tried to assassinate a presidential candidate this weekend. Now I know that, technically, we consider 20-year-olds adults. But I teach 20-year-olds. I know they’re still somewhere between childhood and adulthood, their brains not yet fully formed.
But what in the world would lead a such a young man to try to kill a former president?
Susan Shaw
The kids simply are not all right.
Teen anxiety, depression and other mental health struggles continue to rise. Nearly a quarter of teens girls have contemplated suicide, as have half of LGBTQ teens.
I recall a conversation with my goddaughter a few years ago when she was around 12 or 13 years old. We were talking about her anxiety about climate change, and she said, “I wish I’d been born sooner. I don’t think I have a future.”
Wow. This is a middle class white kid with everything going for her.
“I wish I’d been born sooner. I don’t think I have a future.”
What about other kids?
Reports are upward of 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war with Israel. The U.N. called Gaza a “graveyard” for children.
Nearly 2,000 children have been killed or wounded in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Around the world, children are hungry, displaced, orphaned, uneducated, sick and dying.
And why is that?
Some of you may remember Harry Chapin’s song, “Cat’s in the Cradle.” In that song, a dad explains how he never had time for his son who said he was going to grow up to be like his dad. By the end of the song, the boy is grown and no longer has time for his retired dad who sings, “as I hung up the phone it occurred to me / He’d grown up just like me / My boy was just like me.”
If the children are not all right, it’s because the world we’ve created and maintained has made them that way.
It did that to us too. But we’re the adults now, and we can choose a different way, but we rarely do. We’re not all right either.
We tend to keep passing the pain along, generation after generation, because it’s built into the systems around us that keep the powerful in place. Oh, they’re broken too, but the pain grows exponentially the further one finds oneself down the food chain.
What’s scary to me, though, is how little we really care about much of anything that’s not right on our doorsteps, like those children in Gaza and Ukraine or a messed up young man — until he puts himself on our doorsteps by trying to assassinate a former president.
I’m sure we’ll hear all the usual laments about his outsider status and his mental state. It’s so much easier to blame the kids than the systems that keep churning them out and burning them up.
“It’s so much easier to blame the kids than the systems that keep churning them out and burning them up.”
And if you want to know how little the church cares about children, just look at how it’s handling sex abuse scandals. The church is much more concerned about maintaining itself as an institution than doing justice for the children who will spend their lives dealing with the trauma created by abusers enabled and protected by the church.
Exactly who does care whether or not the children are all right? Don’t be fooled by the “Don’t Say Gay” and anti-trans bathroom and sports laws that politicians claim are to “protect” kids. Those are dog whistles and red meat for people who call bigotry “conviction” and hate their “civil rights.”
It’s not the nuclear family. Most children are abused by people they know, often those in their own homes. The nuclear family is only rightly named because it blows up so many lives.
No wonder the kids are not all right. No wonder we’re not all right.
We’re more defined by whom we oppose rather than whom we love, so much so that a global pandemic didn’t bring us together. It further divided us. We didn’t show ourselves as people who value human life. Rather, we divided ourselves over vaccinations, face masks and the very same politician who almost got shot by one of the kids who is not all right.
And here we go again.
When’s it ever going to end? A lot of folks think this is just all to be expected as we hurtle toward Armageddon. Cynical though I am, I’m not quite that fatalistic.
Process theology suggests there is always the possibility for novelty, something new injected into the trajectory we’re on that can change things in unexpected ways. On the one hand, that could be disastrous, like the development of nuclear weapons. But it also means we could find our way to be better than we are.
Apologies to the Calvinists among us, but I don’t think any of that future is set. The future is radically open, and so we can destroy ourselves with pollution and war and hate, or we can redeem the world by transforming it.
We’re not all right. But we could be. The alternative is unthinkable.
Susan M. Shaw is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. She also is an ordained Baptist minister and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Surviving God: A New Vision of God through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors, co-authored with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.
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