We had originally thought the internet would be the new town square, giving everyone a voice and making even the most excluded among us feel comfortable. Instead, it became a war zone, turning the most comfortable of us into the most uncomfortable. Every day we were given new phrases and appellations to learn—cis-gender, nonbinary—and sanctioned when we used them incorrectly, or didn’t use them at all.
Age-old norms and codes about race and gender were being rewritten day after day, and we struggled to keep up, the fear of all this change creating a backlash of bathroom bans and teen sport brawls. Our children were adaptable—children always are. They felt liberated even not to have to conform to the rigid castes of jock and nerd and beauty queen. But our adult brains had been wired to see the world the old way, and we either struggled to adapt or raged against the ask, fighting to put our sons and daughters back into the boxes that made sense. Had this rejection of who they wanted to be in favor of who we felt comfortable parenting flipped a switch?
Most had been born under the financial uncertainty of the global economic collapse in 2008, only to spend their first critical teenage months imprisoned at home, “distance learning,” while their parents day drank and communed with their screens, trying to maintain some sense of momentum in their children’s lives. The economy collapsed again. Depression spiked feelings of apathy and dislocation.
How ironic that the spread of the vaccine that “liberated” them from their endless quarantine also sent them back into the shooting range that was high school and middle school and elementary.
Remember Folkdale High. Remember Crosby Middle. Remember Altamonte University.
Was this it? we wondered. Were our children simply killing themselves before someone else did?
We blamed ourselves, of course. Had we neglected them? Smothered them? Were we tiger moms or elephant moms or dolphin moms? Helicopter parents or lawn mower parents or attachment parents?
Was it our politics? Our endless bickering? Please tell us. What is the answer? we asked ourselves. What did we miss? But maybe the answer was so obvious we were looking right through it the whole time.
Maybe it was us. Maybe humanity itself was the problem.
When you think about it, the numbers of our existence are crushing. We have grown so used to the historic weight of our collective past, with its pogroms and purges, its fossil fuel anguish and genocidal wars, that we forget what it feels like to learn about them for the first time. A child is born. He or she asks their parents, What is this world I am entering? And before they’re old enough to drive or drink or vote, they have learned about slavery and the holocaust. They’ve learned about colonization, voter suppression, and civil war.
We cook them waffles and send them to school, their mittens clipped to their sleeves, so they can learn that, between 1525 and 1866, 12,500,000 Africans were hunted, captured, and shipped to America to be slaves.
Twenty-six percent of them were children.
Now eat your vegetables.
We drive them to playdates and buy them smartphones, installing software so we can monitor their Snapchats and TikTok accounts for inappropriate content, then show them how 6,000,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps during World War Two—1,320,000 of them executed in just three months.
How was school today? we ask when we pick them up. Did you make any new friends?
We carpool to birthday parties, acting like homelessness is a normal part of the social order, like mentally ill people yelling at cars in the crosswalks was something we’d accepted, something they would just need to learn to live with.
We assault them with facts—577,000 Syrians killed in a civil war that created 5,600,000 refugees and displaced 6,200,000 people. Meanwhile, in China, the government has rounded up more than 1,000,000 Uighurs and forced them into “reeducation camps.” We tell them to memorize these “facts” in case there’s a test, as if the math of human mass murder is the same as the volume of a sphere. As if the past is a bloodless lesson they can absorb and file away, just like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
We act, in other words, like hatred, intolerance, and violence are normal. Now be a good boy, we tell them. Be a good girl. Don’t have a nervous breakdown. Don’t self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Don’t call us hypocrites or reject our moral authority. Don’t think about ending it all before you grow up to become hypocrites like us. We are your parents, your elders, and we know what’s best.
Thinking about it now, in hindsight, we could do worse than to ask—is this what drove our otherwise sane children to suicide?
The Nadirs
There are two major political parties in America. I would write their names here, but the words themselves cause otherwise good-mannered people to curse and spit on the ground, so instead let’s use names that are more onomatopoetic—that means names derived from the sounds each party makes. To wit, let’s call one party the Party of Truth and the other the Party of Lies. But here’s the catch. Members of each party believe their party is the Party of Truth and that their adversaries belong to the Party of Lies.
For example, right now the Party of Truth is in power.
Before that the Party of Truth was in power.
(Except it was the other party.)
You can see how this is going to go.
For short, let’s call one side Truthers and the other side Liars.
Which is which depends on you.