It’s Probably Not The End of The World As We Know It, So Act Accordingly
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How did my grandparents manage to live long, productive lives? They survived Stalinism and the Second World War, and two of them started out as orphans. To be sure, my cousin’s grandmother spent a good part of her teens hiding out from the Nazis in Lugansk, and was later terrified to leave her house without her husband, the returning victorious Red Army soldier. If one has to be deathly frightened of something, the Holocaust is a damn good thing to be frightened of.
Alex Williams makes an argument that we live in the age of anxiety. To be sure there are some very good reasons to be anxious today. Some of them have to do with the affect of technology on the human brain, some — with history. Lena Dunham recently told fans,
“I don’t remember a time not being anxious.” Having suffered debilitating anxiety since age 4, the creator, writer and star of the anxiety-ridden “Girls” recalled how she “missed 74 days of 10th grade” because she was afraid to leave her house. This was around the time that the largest act of terrorism in United States history unfolded near the TriBeCa loft where she grew up.
This is a very good reason to be anxious. Like my cousin’s grandmother, Lena witnessed an act of war at an early age. No snowflakiness there. However, most young people in this country only experienced 9/11 on TV screens, which was still a horrific experience, but not the kind that’s expected cause a chronic mental illness, certainly not among’s today’s teenagers for whom the Taliban’s attack on the United States was never a shocking news. And yet
According to data from the National Institute of Mental Health, some 38 percent of girls ages 13 through 17, and 26 percent of boys, have an anxiety disorder. On college campuses, anxiety is running well ahead of depression as the most common mental health concern, according to a 2016 national study of more than 150,000 students by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University.
Why? The Instagram-fueled “fear of missing out” which Williams mentions is what is colloquially know as the first world problem. It doesn’t mean that the Millennials do not experience real challenges. There is a lot of pressure to do well academically, and there are the disappearing blue collar jobs, and a whole lot of insecurity. It’s all legitimate, but none of it comes anywhere near surviving Operation Barbarossa.
When quoting in parentheses Williams is onto something:
(“Are you anxious because you feel like the world is ending?” the hosts of “Generation Anxiety,” a podcast aimed at millennials, ask in a recent episode called “So You’ve Inherited the Apocalypse?” “Well the good news is you aren’t crazy and it definitely is.”)
A hang nail wouldn’t cause anxiety in 38% of teenage girls, and I seriously doubt that many have biological predisposition to mental illnesses.
On the other hand, on November 9, 2016 my children came home from school wondering if I can stay in the country. Turns out, some parents in our elementary told their children that now that Donald Trump is elected immigrants will be deported, and now their children related the news to mine. I made sure to laugh loudly and explain that their buddies misunderstood something. That mommy, now a US citizen, worked in immigration and knows the laws. Mommy came to the United States legally, was never out of status, never broke the law and never lied to immigration officials. Legal, law-abiding immigrants are not deportable.
And yet some people skillfully and deliberately are not only blurring the line between legal and illegal immigration, and by doing so are causing damage to our American kids.
This is a very minor case, of course, affecting the young first generation Americans only. All our kids are in danger of apocalyptic environmentalism. Today’s teens grew up believing that flamingos are about to migrate to Canada because the tropics are about to become a boiling witches’ cauldron. OK, I’m exaggerating, but only a little. As Al Gore once said, and as Interior Department apparently continues to insist, the Statue of Liberty is in danger of being submerged by the ocean due to global warming. Our children really do think that the world is about to end.
We demand action from them, too. Neurotic action, like sorting garbage into three cans, the landfill, the recyclables and the compost. We ourselves don’t know what goes into which one. Some plastic is recyclable? Giftwrap is landfill unless states otherwise?
The Earth is not going to fall off the axis if we use a single bin for all garbage, and yet we continue inventing ecological horror stories for our kids. We pretty much have to in order for them to follow the labyrinthine rules of Greens. It’s not cost free.
I understand the educators have to follow the guidelines, but what’s in it for the parents? If we want the best for our children, we should probably stop frightening them for our ego’s sake.
P.S. I will now blame Girls on Taliban.
