Screw "It Gets Better"

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the “It Gets Better” movement. I love some of the videos. And although I know that they were born as a means of support for gay teenagers, I think they have much broader applications…because middle school and high school suck for a lot of kids.

But, why do we accept that?

Long before there was an “It Gets Better” campaign, parents were commiserating with their kids that middle school was horrible for everyone, but it ended and before long it would be a fading memory. Teachers and administrators rolled their eyes and talked about how “difficult” adolescents were, feeling more sorry for themselves than for the 13-year-old girls contemplating suicide in the back of their classrooms.

I heard those platitudes when I was in middle school in the late 70s, and I was still hearing them when I rescued my youngest child from 8^th grade in 2009.  In thirty years, the best we’ve come up with is a video series that reassures our kids that the hell we’re forcing them through won’t last forever.

If you lived in an apartment building where your twelve-year-old was routinely bullied in the hallways, to the point that he was depressed and his whole personality was changing, would you give him a hug and remind him that in six short years he could move out on his own and get away from this? If you worked in an environment that made you physically ill every morning, if you stepped off of the commuter train each day kind of hoping you’d be hit by a car so you didn’t actually have to enter that building, would you keep that job for three or five or six years?

I suspect not—at least, not if there were any way possible for you to change it. Yet, we accept the high-stress, abusive, soul-destroying environment that is public school for adolescents and teenagers without a blink.  We agree that it’s horrible, nod sympathetically, and tell our kids to hurry up and get in the car so that we can deliver them to its doors once again. And, we’re thankful when something like the “It Gets Better” series appears to give them hope for the future.

That’s our job.

And we don’t show them that there’s hope for the future by encouraging them to quietly serve their time in purgatory, to curl in on themselves and learn to protect themselves from the world and hide who they are until they can escape that environment. We don’t show them hope by telling them they’ll be happy when they’re twenty-five and expecting that to be enough, expecting them to even know what that means. We show them that the future can be better by showing them how to change it, by working our asses off to make the school environment better or by removing them from it and showing them that better world instead of just promising that it will come along one day.

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 15.8% of teens had seriously considered suicide in the 12 months preceding the survey. In fact, 5,400 7^th to 12^th graders in the United States attempt suicide every single day. And we wait for it to pass? Hope they’re not successful, or that our kids are the ones who escape (and the hell with the ones who don’t make it)? Because, you know, that’s just how the teen years are.

Title notwithstanding, I mean no disrespect to the folks behind “It Gets Better.”  I think it’s fantastic that successful people from many walks of life have invested the time and emotional energy to share their personal stories and give our kids enough hope to get them through the worst years of their lives. Now, it’s time that parents, teachers, school administrators and everyone else who controls our children’s destinies get to work making that unnecessary.

The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Scandal from a Very Different Perspective

Recently, a white guy took his mixed-race children to Wal-Mart and all hell broke loose.  Someone--stories seem to vary on whether it was a customer or Wal-Mart security--saw the guy with kids who "didn't seem to fit" and called the police. The police went by his house (immediately) to check it out, determined that everything was okay and went on their way...and then roughly 276,383 bloggers and minor news sources got involved.

If you've ever read this blog before, you probably know that I'm not a racist.  My daughter literally didn't know that there were different races until she went to school and someone else filled her in, despite regularly interacting with people from at least a dozen different countries.  She viewed the differences in the color of their skin no differently than differences in hair color or height.  Probably, had she been in that parking lot, it wouldn't have registered with her that those little girls didn't look like the biological children of the man they were with.  And that's a lovely society to look forward to.  But it's also beside the point.

Discrimination sucks, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't really know what it's like. I've seen it, but as a middle-aged white chick, I haven't felt it.  But it, too, seems to me to be rather beside the point in this case.

What happened is that someone saw very young children with a man they thought perhaps shouldn't have them and acted.  Then, the police immediately followed up to make sure those children were safe.

Yes, it was an inconvenience and probably very stressful for the parents, and I'm not minimizing that.  But look at the bottom line: it's not that a stranger at Wal-Mart was racist because he or she recognized that it's very rare in our society for a white man to have children who appear to be African American.  It's that a stranger at Wal-Mart went out on a limb to make sure that a stranger's children were safe.

Just recently, we saw the escape of three women who had been held captive in Ohio for years.  After the escape, neighbors told us that they'd called the police on more than one occasion, but the investigation was half-hearted at best and those girls grew into women as captive victims.  Not these cops.  They followed up so quickly that they reached the guy's house before he got home himself.

I'm a mother and a grandmother, and I can tell you without reservation that if some stranger had ever called the police because of something out of the ordinary they thought they'd witnessed, and the police ran right over to my house and asked me to prove that those kids were mine or that their mommy knew I had them, I'd offer a sincere thank you.  No, it wouldn't be any fun, but I WANT to live in a society where strangers care about children they think may be in danger and police follow up quickly.

In 1999 (the last year studied), 797,000 children were reported missing.  33,000 of those are believed to be non-family abductions--you know, people like those girls in Ohio or Elizabeth Smart or, worse, young children who are molested, terrorized and then killed.  When those children survive, it's often because something out of the ordinary caught the eye of a stranger, who had the courage to act...and then the police took that person seriously enough to investigate quickly and thoroughly.  Amber Alert reports alone have saved 642 children since the program was implemented.

Our ridiculous knee-jerk reaction to the fact that racial disparity was an element that caught the eye of the reporter in this case has sent a powerful message to society that if you're uncertain, you should keep your damned mouth shut.  It's just not worth the risk to make that call and have the press ranting about what a horrible person you are for weeks on end because you wanted to make sure that kid was okay.  You were probably wrong anyway.

So...mission accomplished.  Society has learned its lesson about getting involved and children may die, but better that than having them saved because someone recognized a racial disparity and wasn't quite sure about it, right?