by
Andrew Malekoff, Executive Director, North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center email:
amalekoff@northshorechildguidance.org Published
in the Long Island Anton Newspapers, April 26, 2007 As
each month of the year approaches I am reminded of special occasions like birthdays
and anniversaries. My wife and I were born in May. Our wedding anniversary
is in July.
But, over the past few years too many months are closing in on
me in a different sort of a
way. As September approaches, 9/11 is the first
thing that jumps to mind. And April, this
month, brings Columbine to consciousness. Although
the April 20, 1999 high school massacre took place in Littleton, Colorado, it
affected young people, parents, and school officials all across the United
States. At the
time, schools redoubled efforts to ensure security, emergency
rooms and outpatient clinic
emergency visits spiked, and a general sense of
anxiety filled schools across the US. This
brings me back to the one-month anniversary of the Columbine shootings in one
northeastern suburb, when I met with a group of 12 teenagers and 8 adults
from several
of our communities who were doing their best to cope in the aftermath
of the tragedy.
I recall asking the group, "Although you're over a thousand miles away from
Columbine, what impact has the shootings had on you?" A mix of amazement
and shock
were expressed. A
slight girl, Alison, the only eighth-grader in the group wondered, "What
could have
happened to these kids that made them feel so hopeless to push
them to this point?"
Sitting directly across from her an older girl with
red-streaked hair and purple lipstick
chimed in, "I always thought school
was the safest place." After a flurry of comments
about how insensitive
kids can be, a younger teen who was sandwiched between two
adults remarked,
"Everyone was nice to each other in school for about a week after the
shootings.
But now (as if they forgot) they're still making fun of kids who get tortured
everyday. Here we go again." The
discussion seamlessly shifted to the unpredictable nature of life today and how,
as
one young group member ironically put it, "Just going to school these
days is an act of
courage."
One mom, Maria, who is also a guidance counselor recalled, "As a kid I grew
up in
a poor neighborhood in the inner city, which was not a safe place to
be. The school doors
were always locked and chained. You never used the bathroom
and didn't know when
you might get beat up, when you might be a target of
rage. If you wanted to be protected
you had to connect with a gang, a group.
So now I live in the suburbs, which I thought
would be safe for my kids. It's
quiet and there are no fights, yet the terror is the same.
The fears I thought
I had escaped have returned, only in a new form. It (Columbine)
could happen
anywhere…It's very scary to the whole society." Carlos,
an immigrant from El Salvador, was reminded of a recent incident when he was
stopped by a police officer who asked to check his arms. "He was looking
for gang
tattoos. He thought I was MS 13 (a notorious Salvadorian gang),"
he explained while
slowly pulling his shirt sleeve back across his forearm
as if back in the moment. "I told
the cop, 'First, of all I'm Salvadorian
and proud of it. Second, I'm not a gang banger.' "A
week later,"
Carlos continued, "I saw the same cop at my job at Pierre's (restaurant).
It
was the same cop! Well, I work as a maitre de at Pierre's and I was wearing
my tuxedo.
He looked me over and seemed really confused, puzzled. I smiled
and said to him 'See
I'm the same person.'" Jackie,
a 15-year-old girl with a stud in her tongue then told the story about how when
she got her tongue pierced, all of a sudden, "Everybody looked at me
differently, like I
was from another planet, a dirt bag. But I'm the same!
I'm
still a good student. I'm the same kid as before." After
awhile the students in the group talked about, as one 16-year old girl stated,
"What
we really need." To everyone's surprise they said that what
they really needed and
wanted was closer relationships with adults in home
and at school. I remarked to the
teens, "You seem to be starving for
someone to simply listen to you." When asked, the
teens openly admitted
that they push grown ups away. I followed up by asking, "Is this
what
you really want to happen, to push the adults in your lives away?"
The
overwhelming response was an emphatic "No!" The interchange that followed
revealed a
paradoxical side of young people that often confounds adults, the
tension between
seeking intimacy and suffering isolation. As
the meeting winded down to a close I asked the young people, "Can you tell
the
adults, before we say goodbye, what it is that they don't understand about
you, about kids
in general, that they should?" Their
responses included, "Be more open minded and less judgmental," "Everybody
has
a little something weird about them, whether a freckle or a pierced tongue
or a tattoo," "
There is no normal, normal is everyone. There are
numbers and quotas and averages; but
people are not numbers and averages.
People need to learn that they're not just one
thing," and "We need
to celebrate rather than fear differences." The
adults' final words complemented those of the kids and included, "Maybe reaching
out with our hearts as well as our brains will make a difference…it's
good to be reminded
of this…we tend to forget, I tend to forget…after
all, all of our kids are everyone's kids." (This
column was written just prior to the massacre at Virginia Tech University, another
sad reminder for many Aprils to come - Andrew Malekoff
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