Maybe Our Kids Will Make America Great Again

The Independent, a UK online news source, reported this week that Jack Wood, a 15-year-old boy from South London rescued a baby and a grandmother from a burning house. Jack was walking to school when he saw smoke coming from a neighbor’s house. He knows the family and knew a baby and grandmother lived there. He called his mother and told her to call the fire department. Then he ran into the house and grabbed the baby and put it on the lawn outside. He then went back into the house and got the grandmother and led her out to safety. Then he went back into the house, found a bucket, filled it with water and proceeded to put out the fire until the fire department got there. “I just wanted to get the baby and the gran out and make sure the fire was out,” Jack told reporters. All three were treated for smoke inhalation, but Jack was called a hero for saving the lives of the baby and the grandmother.

Kids today, like kids in all days, are so easily dismissed. But young people today are awesome. They are smart, articulate, poised, informed, and not quickly intimidated. The kids from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students were murdered and others severely wounded, have shown remarkable courage and determination since the tragedy.

Emma Gonzalez, one of the surviving students, has shown incredible maturity and fearlessness. She has become an eloquent and competent spokesperson for her class members and school. Already, though, adults are shaming her, accusing her and other outspoken students asking for gun controls, as “actors,” and “phonies,” and so forth.

Congress, a crowd of people so smug and ineffective it’s laughable to call them leaders, made their usual gestures of concern regarding the killings. Some mumbled on about necessary changes. Some suggested better background checks. A pathetic and tiresome attempt to sound sincere. In the end, Congress will do nothing about gun control. They even silenced president Trump, who initially called for raising the age of gun purchasers and banning gun bump stocks. Apparently, it was just talk. Nothing substantial will happen regarding gun control in this country.

Unless, of course, the brave students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School don’t give up their fight to make something happen. I am pulling for them and other students around the country who are hoping to force politicians to take gun control seriously and make real changes or else get voted out of office.

Young people in every generation have had their exposure to sex, drugs, alcohol, and the usual temptations of youth. But the exposure for them today is quite extraordinary. Bullying, violence, opioids, heroin, alcohol, STDs, guns, and the dangers of just attending school now require kids today to grow up instantly. Their phones and laptops and tablets give them simple access to porn, brutality in all forms, insane acts of risk and even death. The current obsession of kids eating Tide pods is only one example.

Child and adolescent psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Koplewicz, was quoted recently in Psychology Today saying that teens today are vulnerable to mood disorders. The decision-making part of their brains is not fully developed until their mid-twenties. They need guidance and support from parents and other adults to help them with risky and often dangerous choices. “There’s a real difference between the brains of teenagers and adults,” Dr. Koplewicz said. “They feel everything so much more intensely.”

We do an irreparable disservice to our children and teenagers when we dismiss their concerns, ignore their needs, make light of their interest in sex and intimacy, stay detached from them emotionally, and miss their signals of hurt, discouragement, and depression.

And yet, in spite of all they have to face today, kids like Jack Wood and Emma Gonzalez, are all around us. If we fail them. If we wave them off as just jabbering teens looking for attention. Then we adults will have proven ourselves to be fools, rude and insensitive, pompous and blind to the amazing potential for good our youth have in them.

There are some future politicians and leaders in these kids today. God, I hope they don’t burn out and grow cynical, before they have a chance to actually, truly, make America great again.

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