202. American Youth

I love the youth of America—really the world, but I’ll focus on home. (Having the great privilege of teaching a year in England, I quickly learned that people are really the same wherever you go.) I spent my entire working career investing everything I have in American teenagers and I absolutely love everything about them (including the fact that they grow up and become adults!). Right now my heart aches so much for them because they are living through one of the most terrifying periods of history that is full of anger and fear, so I really can’t let them go just because I’ve retired from teaching. I love the resiliency of young people in spite of society’s constant need to categorize them based on academic test scores. Most kids don’t care one iota about their test scores unless they get something more out of it than societal fear mongering that our country is falling apart and we are failing our youth. Our youth seem to fend very well for themselves. I love that about them.

Young people are alternately suspicious and excited about the adult world. In America we unwittingly encourage that by enticing everyone with alluring ads that make things look far more wonderful than they are and constantly telling our youth that they are too young to engage in such activities. What kids see is a mix of burned out adults strung out on alcohol, tobacco, sex, etc. and they can read through all the garbage of advertising to see the reality, yet sometimes, like all of us, they fall for it. Usually they know exactly why adults tell them they aren’t old enough: because adults are strung out. Youth know the difference between protection and outright lies.

Sure, young people experiment with things and as parents and adults that scares us. We don’t want our kids to be addicts to anything and we shouldn’t. But experimentation leads to knowledge, so our job needs to be guidance, both from experience and a true love for humanity. There is a great deal of joy at all things new with young people, just as there is a great fear of things that are, in the end, meaningless and something that time will eradicate—being bullied because you are different or feeling inadequate because of some feeling that isn’t even real. While all of that joy and fear balled up into one young person is terrifying, it is also inexpressibly beautiful to me and I see its fruition every day when a former student, now an electrician, fixes a light in my home, or a nurse, a former student, helps me with an illness. The beautiful people whom I love are constantly growing up and taking charge. They are America. I am astounded at the beauty and courage of the young people here in my home and very proud to have been a part of their lives in any great or small way.

There’s no doubt that kids in packs can seem sulky, intimidating, and downright frightening as they hang in glowering groups daring you to acknowledge them. Some of them will even seemingly jeer at you. And we will always think today’s kids are worse than when we were kids all while telling stories of horrible things that we did when we were young. The truth is that all that fear of ridicule still resides in us and that kids are the same now as always. The beauty is that they are made of penetrable stuff, that they can see that just as we can, that they are able to move mountains, that they will move mountains. I am enamored of young people.