MARILYN PENN: UNEARNED SYMPATHY
http://politicalmavens.com/
In an article referencing the anomie of young people like Henry Wachtel, the teenager who beat his mother to death last week, Ginia Bellafante suggests that it’s impossible “to view Mr. Wachtel’s tragedy apart from the life that the film suggests – one in which parents are absent, opportunities seem meager and the resulting freedoms feel joyless in the wake of so much anxiety about a precarious future.” (NYTimes 4/15/12 The film is “Our Time,” a cinema verite short in which Henry Wachtel had a leading role. It appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year and deals with middle class teens in New York who are not part of the affluent life style and high achievement of kids prominently in view in this city of 1 percenters. As I read this article, I thought back to previous generations of teenagers – immigrants who came to this country without the language or the means to survive – who not only survived but excelled; teenagers who got drafted into the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War – some never to return, some to return as physical or mental basket cases, many of whom overcame their crippling disabilities to resume their lives or bravely create new ones. I thought of the words “so much anxiety” to describe kids who have a roof over their heads, a means of support, educational opportunities, no draft in sight and in Henry’s case, a mother who lived with and cared for him.
In this particularly gruesome case, Henry is an epileptic who may have other problems either related to that condition or exacerbated by it so it seems particularly inappropriate to try to tailor any generalizations to fit him. But let’s talk about Gen Y kids in general, the ones who are described in the film and the article. Let’s wonder why these kids are so unaware of their good fortune to be living in a relatively secure place compared to other hotspots in the world today. Let’s wonder why they probably don’t know about the North Korean boy, born in a forced labor camp, who at the age of 14, turned in his mother and brother for execution in order to get more food and an easier job at school. This is from the book reviewed in the NYT of April 12th – “Escape From Camp 14″ by Blaine Harden, depicting a society so tyrranical and severe that Shin Dong-hyuk saw children killed for minor infractions and saw people eating rats to stay alive. Let’s ask why Americans learn about the “torture” at Gitmo where prisoners gain weight but are unknowledgable about what that word means in the real hellholes of this world. And let’s ask why the anxiety of young middle-class Americans deserves sympathetic credibility instead of an insistence on greater responsibility for their own lives and a minimum expectancy of sufficient resilence to live them without whining.
There are children in this country whose lives are bleak beyond understanding, who are abused physically, sexually and emotionally in ways that rival wartime experiences. Their names pop up in newspapers as they are tortured or killed by parents or a mother’s boyfriend or a random bullet shot by a neighborhood thug. But the Gen Y-ers of urban America don’t inhabit the socio-economic strata of the underclass and can’t be viewed with the same degree of compassion. If we allow the excuse of “so much anxiety” to be applied to American kids who have excess freedom without guarantees of future success, what words will be sufficient to describe the plight of the majority of third world teenagers who face war, poverty, hunger, disease, persecution, orphan-hood, slavery, exploitation, illiteracy and the struggle to care for their siblings and just live one more day? Is it too much to expect Americans to be aware of the bigger picture and cognizant of their privileged existence? Perhaps the filmmaker who created “Our Time” should have taken her young subjects to a veteran’s hospital to hellp other young people who had put their own lives on the line to illuminate the difference between real problems and amorphous complaints. And perhaps Ms Bellafante, a writer I very much admire, should question whether offering unearned sympathy has contributed to the growing malady of weak and disaffected American youth.
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