Feels Like Teen Spirit

In the news today:

The Philippine military has arrested a
suspected Muslim militant and found explosives believed to have been
stored away for attacks on Manila over Easter.

I would just
like to thank God for that. I am so tired of people being killed every
day from this senseless and horrible violence. I want to thank God for
every single valuable life that’s been saved today because somebody
somewhere was vigilantly doing their job of saving people’s lives.

I
am, however, saddened and horrified by the school shooting yesterday. I
look at that young boy’s picture and see this little (or not-so-little)
plump kid who looks like the picture of innocence and I hurt so badly.
I hurt too when I read these diaries of all these young girls, cutting
and hurting and having sex and experiencing pain that is so unbearable.
All it takes is a few random readings and you read overwhelming agony
that teens all over the country and the world are experiencing and I
ask myself, “Why? What is going on in this world that is making this
happen so terribly? Was it always like this?”

Part of it may be
that in the old days people were so absorbed with just surviving…
finding food and staying alive that it took everything they had just to
do that. There wasn’t time to get to that next level on the pyramid –
or whatever that thing is – where self-actualization is above safety.
I’m sure part of it is our lack of deep spirituality in society, and
believing what I believe, specifically Christianity. Still, even when
we did have prayer in school and a seemingly more Christian society, we
were spawning my generation which, in turn, spawned this sad and
desperate generation, so something was wrong. And in my generation
there was LOTS of hidden pain. There was a tremendous amount of incest
and abuse and alcoholism. So I don’t know… maybe the pain was just not
advertised as much. I just don’t know. I took a bottle of sleeping
pills when I was twelve. I, obviously, didn’t die but another kid in
our school succeeded in hanging himself.

Where does it all
come from and what can I do to help? And why do kids insist and hurting
each other so badly? Some of the comments I see show a complete lack of
sensitivity towards other kids. Why do those who hurt so badly think
that hurting others will make themselves feel better? It doesn’t work.
It just makes the bitterness and anger take a deeper root. Why all the
darkness? Why all the hatred? Why do they invite it in? I hurt when I
read about the cutting and the self-harm and self-hatred, but at least
I understand it and empathize with it. I am astounded when I read about
the lashing out at others and causing even MORE pain in the world when
one is dealing with so much of their OWN pain already.

Okay, I
can understand lashing out at those who are causing your pain. If you
are a person who is constantly bullied, I guess it’s understandable but
horrifying if you snap and go into a school armed and ready to take
down those who have been calling you names and picking on you for a
number of years. But why go to a diary of a hurting person who is
spilling out their inner turmoil and post something cutting and mean in
their note section? And, in person, why BE a bully? Why BE one of the
people that says the stuff that will push a person over the edge enough
to actually kill?

I don’t know… I guess I’d better climb down
off my unintentional soap box. It’s just that I get so floored and have
so many mixed feelings. Having been absolutely TORMENTED in junior high
school, so much so that if the sleeping pills had worked I would now
just be an old statistic, I can understand the misery that would lead a
kid to thoughts of murder. I remember being a fan of the show “Man From
U.N.C.L.E.” and one week they had this weapon – it was a pen that was
actually some sort of instrument of death and when you put it up
against the enemy’s neck and pressed it, it instantly killed them. I
remember day dreaming about how wonderful it would be to have one of
those to use on the kids that were tormenting me. You see, there was a
group of girls who made my life miserable. We had a sewing class and
they used to trap me in the back room and stick me with needles. They
shoved me, hit me, said terrible things to me. Never had anyone been so
miserable. And the thing was, they had once been my friends. The
trouble was, hanging with them caused my grades to drop and I got in
big trouble with my family so I had to pull away. Once I did that, they
antagonism was dreadful and from then on I was a marked person. My life
was horrid. Anything they could do to fill it with distress, they did.
After awhile I couldn’t stand it any more and that’s why I took the
sleeping pills. I didn’t die, I just sort of passed out and heard weird
voices then came to later. No one was home and I never got caught. Only
my best friend knew about it. I never told my family until many years
later.

At the same time, I was recovering from sexual abuse
from my brother and earlier my father, so things were not exactly
pleasant in any aspect of my life. I had no one and nothing and can
remember to this day some of the girls who did the worst to me. So when
Columbine happened, I can’t say I didn’t have some understanding of
what may have driven those boys to do what they did. Other kids
persecuted those boys, called them gay (which is one of the worst
insults you can give an insecure straight teen boy) and pushed them
around. The case with this new shooting will probably be real similar.
So I have an easier time understanding these kids in some ways than I
do understanding the kids who allow themselves to be so mean to kids
who are already down. I guess it’s like the devil rises up in you and
you just keep kicking and kicking. It’s not like I’ve never felt that
urge. But the awareness that the other person is a human being stopped
me from acting on it. The bullies seem to be able to repress that
awareness and they, actually, lose their humanity in the process.