DARE

I speculated earlier at the terror I would feel if I were a parent of a teenaged daughter who listened to H.I.M. or some other suicide-glamorizing satanic glam rock. But actually, after a few minutes of reflection I realized that I probably would never have anything to worry about.

I recently read She Said Yes, the story of the girl who, in the library at Columbine, was asked if she believed in God. Her mother told of earlier years where she had listened to Marilyn Manson and written out fantasies of killing herself and her family. Sounded like pretty typical teenage stuff to me, but I could understand in some measure what the family must have gone through. The family sent the girl to some fundie Christian school and only allowed her to go to social functions of the church youth group from her school, where at some point she miraculously had some kind of spiritual awakening.

This reminds me of when I was in high school. I was in high school in the eighties, and of course those were the Reagan years. Reagan’s gotten a lot of great press since he died, and I don’t mean to tread on the memory of the dead, but I came of age when there was a lunatic in the White House and thousands of nuclear warheads on a hairtrigger on both sides of the planet. More frightening than Soviet warheads was a President who lied with impunity—I was eleven years old when I started asking if it was my imagination or if the President was a big fat liar. All the adults, even the bleeding heart liberals, thought it was unthinkable and told me it was my imagination.

So anyone that was surprised at the whole Iran-Contra mess? An eleven-year-old could see that one coming and did in fact tell you so. Why they called that maniac the great communicator, I’ll still never know.

So yes, my generation read 1984 in 1984. And we saw a planet gone so far beyond insane that the only future we saw for ourselves was nuclear winter. I’m not sure how old I was, but somewhere between six and eight years old when my mother told me to appreciate the blue sky because it might be the last one I ever see.

Did we freak out? Hell yes we freaked out. We dove into drugs and fantasy and tried to kill ourselves, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. The world we inherited was a nightmare of terror and when we spoke up we were told that there’s nothing wrong and it was all in our heads.

None of our parents knew what to do with us, but a lot of them tried what Cassie Bernall’s parents tried. If you have a problem child, send them away.

I lost count of the kids I knew in high school who went away to involuntary vacations in inpatient mental health wards and facilities. Why were they locked up away from anyone they knew? Because their parents didn’t know how to deal with a child becoming an adult in a world where every moment was twenty minutes from armageddon. Parents would either have to admit that they brought children into this ticking time bomb or else find doctors willing to administer thorazine and tie a sixteen year old up in a straightjacket and put the problem away.

Like I said, I lost count of how many of my classmates went away to the nuthouse before I graduated from high school. And I think it’s pretty screwed up that I understand the phrase “cognitive dissonance” because it was a relief to know that there was a name for what I experienced through high school. Reagan was emblematic, but he was just the tip of the iceberg. We also had D.A.R.E. cops lying straight through their teeth at us, trying to scare us with the “facts” about drugs. Everywhere we turned we were fed lies as if we were too stupid to suspect. Then later we’d get some real information backed by scientific research and peer-reviewable study methods and the lucky ones of us figured out simply not to ever trust a policeman or a politician. The rest of us were confused and scared.

I’m just writing this out to remind myself, if I ever become a parent, not to tell lies and not to push a problem away into an asylum. I’m sure it’s easier said than done, but I have to remember this very important fact:

I am one of the lucky ones.

My parents were far from perfect, but I think they played it straight with me and they never panicked and packed me off to Elmhurst or the Yale Psychiatric Institute (more commonly called YPI or “Yippie”) when it was the cool thing for parents to do. Whatever they told me about drugs were their own opinions and honestly gleaned information.

I am one of the lucky ones.

So what could I do if I had a child who came home with a CD with a “parental advisory” label on it? And lyrics like “Oh baby, join me in death”? It’s too easy to be glib about this stuff, but if I had a kid who was listening to Satanic rock, well, hell, I could lend her my copy of The Satanic Bible and introduce her to the few friends I still have who are practicing Satanists. If that didn’t take all the fun out of it, I don’t know what would. I pray that I could get through it without resorting to falsehood.

Lets face it. From Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush, it’s not like we’ve had a decrease in bald-faced lies from our leaders. D.A.R.E. is in full swing. You can replace nuclear winter with the threat of terrorism, I suppose. And handing out mood and mind-altering drugs to children is now absolutely de rigeur. It seems absolutely critical that I remember this if I ever have kids of my own.