We've Left the Kids With a Vacuum of Hope

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One of the great things about being young is that you have, or should have, so much to look forward to: Career, independence, love, family. Okay, it doesn't turn out that way for everyone; I, too, have had disappointments. There are times when one needs self-care and self-sustenance.

But a statistic I read the other day, from an important article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette (as reprinted in a Door County paper), shook me pretty hard. The first sentence will do: "One in 10 Wisconsin teenagers have attempted suicide over the last three years."

One in 10. Ten percent. The high school in which I taught had, with few exceptions, at least a thousand students each year, in a town not very big. In a school of a thousand kids, in the scope of three-fourths of their high school experience, a hundred of those kids would have attempted suicide, or about four classrooms full. The report did not say what percentage of that percentage succeeded.

By any measurement, that is staggering. Let's go on with the same paragraph: "More than one-third of high schoolers feel sad or hopeless." In that same school of a thousand kids, more than three hundred of them don't think the future holds much hope.

End of paragraph: "Half of Wisconsin youths have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety or behavior problems." Half. In a school of a thousand students, five hundred.

The Wisconsin Office of Children's Mental Health, an agency of the Department of Health Service, made that report. You can guess what weighs on kids' minds nowadays for them to conclude that hope has disappeared into a big, black hole:

• Academic pressures
• Widespread gun violence
• Racism and discrimination (especially with respect to anti-LGBTQ policies)
• Political divisiveness
• Climate change

And some stressors that broadly impact families:

• Lack of child care options
• Financial insecurity
• Food insecurity
• Housing instability

How have the kids coped? They've grasped at the first things to allow them to escape, like vaping and their cell phones. The report says that kids average three hours a day in looking at screens unconnected to their schoolwork; it's true of three-fourths of them.

As one might expect, the rural kids are in the most trouble. Resources for them to deal with their issues are largely unavailable; they make up 70% of those who live in a child care desert. Where do they turn?

Of course, this doesn't stop when the kids become older. Nearly 40% of all Wisconsin adults aged 18 to 25 are experiencing mental illness. The report says that fewer of them went through school without an adult they could trust; they didn't have a sense of belonging in their schools; and there aren't enough school counselors to handle this overload. Kids may go to school to learn things, but they take their personal issues with them.

The article goes on to suggest what you might guess: More help, encouragement, more and better sleep. And good news: Teenage drinking and pregnancy and bullying rates are down; peer-led wellness programs are up. But taking on the issues above are daunting. Their relentless onslaught can't be defeated without recognizing their source--the adults who've caused them. Otherwise, it's like getting a new pair of mittens for the recent cold snap we've had; they'll work for a while, but frigid is frigid. One needs to get indoors. One needs to be safe.

Safety: We say we want that for kids. But how can we provide it in the depths of their minds when they know that things are contrary? How can they manufacture hope when the adults have let them down so much and so often?

This is beyond mere boosting where we've neglected it. Kids aren't stupid. They grow into their circumstances. We are leaving behind a world that is far more challenging than anything we've experienced--when it should be far less. Our generation, the boomers, have created a world that looks more and more not as a potential shangri-la, but a trap.

No wonder. We should be lucky the number's just ten percent (6% eight years ago; that's bad enough). We have work to do before our time is up: Serious, complicated work that will have to involve cooperation and a sense of community, which these kids sorely lack. Only then will the world around them look positive enough, and have enough hope for them to look past ending it rather than take it on. How sad to want to escape it. How tragic.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Law 27: His Playbook. It's Why We Should Be So Scared.

Any comments, please send them to dadofprince@gmail.com. Thank you!

Sometimes, you pick up a book you really haven't spent time with. It shouts to you and you wonder why the hell it wasn't the first thing you did to understand something.

So it was for me and 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene. It's been sitting in one of my bookcases for a couple of years now. You want ex-'s playbook, even though he isn't likely to have read it? Right there.

All 48 laws apply incredibly well, though in their execution, he's done better in some than in others. But Law 27? Applies in a frightening way. Applies because of mass gullibility. Of mass irresponsibility. Of mass thoughtlessness. In other words, perfectly.

Here it is, #27: Play On People's Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following. All of Greene's "laws" have a "judgment" described beside it, an explanation as to why the person seeking power should engage in the behavior to succeed in grabbing power. The judgment behind #27 is: People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

That is exactly what he's doing. It's as if he's following this book word-for-word.

He's offering a cause: Make America Great Again. It doesn't matter if it means nothing, or it means to create wishful thinking in people's minds that we can be successfully transported into some imaginary past some 50 or 60 years ago that begins and ends nowhere. It's vague enough, but it allows people to forget that they contributed, and still contribute, to our problems, that that burden belongs to someone else, someone who can be, and should be, shunned. It lets them think that, with behaviors that are obsolete or tried and untrue, they can settle into a worryless future without stress.

Giving the new disciples rituals to perform: Wearing the cap and paraphernalia. Going to rallies. Laughing at anything, however ridiculous or mundane, when it's called for. Creating a new belief system: The religious right, mindless as it is, is clinging to him for dear life and connecting their beliefs with his, thus putting the implied (and not so implied) label of religiosity on him, blurring his dundering foolishness with a kind of supernatural gifting. It is the "new faith to follow." 

When the distracted masses cheer for him, they're not even sure what they're cheering for, but they feel better because they're doing it with all who surround them. They act mindlessly. That's the idea.

Think he doesn't know exactly what he's doing? Someone else did. From Mein Kampf (as recorded by William L. Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich):

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.

The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they aren't the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes.

Which is why, by the way, all the books written (as thorough and good as they are) about the horrors and dangers of this awful, despicable man which have happened and which might very well start happening again in the very near future don't amount to a drop in the bucket. The people who should be reading them won't. They don't need to. All they need is the next rally, the next rambling, illogical speech, the next hate-filled rhetorical twist of a phrase. Like addicts, they crave it.

Let Carl Sagan summarize:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Nobody who supports ex- reads the "literary aesthetes." They are too sweet, "lemonade-like." The words must be tough and unsparing toward someone else, the scapegoats, whoever they are. Once you hear him and fall prey, you don't need anything else. Or at least they won't admit it.

They are fanatical in their unity. Yes, it's a cult. It's a big part of their attraction, along with the Goddess of Distress: There always must be some catastrophe just around the corner, and someone else has to be to blame.

If this takes over, we will never be close to a democracy again. We will go to war, probably with Mexico. Ukraine will fall to the Russians with devastating effects on Europe. You think inflation's been bad? Just wait. He will try again and fail to create both guns and butter. He will use a war footing to control the press and educational system.

Read The 48 Laws of Power. Read it because you should know the enemy.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

NIL for the Women

I had to look twice. Here was Caitlin Clark, probably the best women's college basketball player, hawking for State Farm Insurance.

It was all contrived, with Clark wearing her Iowa uniform and discussing State Farm's advantages. But no worse than what any other man would have done. With that, though, a new frontier has emerged.

Professional women have been displayed on other TV ads; Sue Bird, former pro basketball player, comes to mind. Clark, though, is still in college. What she did was, until about a year ago, unthinkable.

We have already come to expect it from collegiate men: the old restrictions have fallen away with court rulings that college athletes, who earn incredible income for their sports programs, especially in football and basketball, can reap some cash for themselves through their names, images and likeness (NIL, it's called: a new hip acronym). I wonder how much State Farm paid her, and I wonder if her agent--no doubt she has one--managed to procure what a man would have.

It's a new form of objectification, one based on earning one's way. The sports women aren't being displayed for their looks. They're being displayed because of their skills and success at a cultural norm that millions of girls now seek and have call to believe they can now achieve: to fill up a stadium so that people can watch them shoot 3-pointers. That's true in Iowa; in South Carolina; in Connecticut; in Tennessee; in South Bend, Indiana, where Notre Dame hangs out. Success and a decent amount of prestige in those venues have been well established for a while, but showing off the teams' stars haven't. 

Having varsity women's basketball is rightfully called "equality" next to that of men's, but the glow from having had that success never happened. Not until now.

What should have caught more people's attention is the forging of new territory for women to show their dominance: volleyball. In Nebraska, for example, 92,000 people went to watch the Cornhusker women--I'm not saying "Lady Cornhuskers," which I'm not even sure they might be called; it suggests they have to do it in skirts and courtesy, which they sure don't--compete not long ago. There are men's collegiate volleyball teams, too, of course, but they don't get nearly the attention that the women do.

I don't watch any Omaha television, so I have no idea whether Nebraska's women stars have been featured on any local ads. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they have.

Wait and see. Caitlin Clark will be touted as a pioneer. The collegiate woman as advertiser is upon us. It was suggested by some commentators the other day, in fact, that maybe Clark should seek another year of college eligibility, because what she will earn as a collegiate standout in terms of NIL will be miles ahead of what she'll get paid once she joins the WNBA, in which she will surely play and have a good career but for which crowds have never equalled that of their male counterparts.

We have come full circle. We are encouraging the women stars to stay in school and shatter whatever faćade of amateurism that may have remained, to get their money upfront and not worry about later consequences. For the men, it's just the opposite; the NBA and NFL need them now, at the ages of 18 or 19, to become absorbed by the glitter and, for some, glamour so they can light up scoreboards. For the men, it's one-and-done. If they go back and graduate, good for them. No assurance they will.

For the women, there is nothing dignified in such a decision either. It's what the market bears. It's cynical but with added advantages: They get to stick around and graduate. For women, win-win. For men, win-maybe lose. Fair enough now?

Both genders get to take advantage of the portal, though. They get to jump around to whatever other colleges look attractive. Though I have no clue about this for sure, I would guess that "attractiveness" won't mean better professors. Think of this: College as a seaport, a gateway to sojourns. Four in four years, possibly. Stability? Never mind. Next!

But if the men get to take advantage of this momentary frivolousness, the women should, too. The most visible collegians will, across the board, put forth the idea that college is a mere means to an end, not training in thinking but training in playing for as long as one can, putting the challenges of real life on hold. Good for the ones who can fit through those eyeholes in the needle, who can be members of that elite. 

The rest will have to reap the whirlwind of dysfunctional educational processes. A certain major at Kansas State is not the same one at Kentucky; there are different courses, different emphases. A student drifting from place to place can get lost within it. A college is not a college is not a college. No sense of belonging.

They're serving a purpose, though. They're still helping big universities rake in millions to help a program sustain itself. They'll still be jettisoned aside, used property albeit with more cash in their pockets, when they're through. Yes, this should happen to women as well as men. Maybe people's eyes will open faster. Maybe they'll see that what we're doing to gifted athletes of both genders has a descending, not ascending, value.

Be well, Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

"Democracy Awakening": A Tough Read, But A Necessary One

(Any comments, please send them to dadofprince@gmail.com. Thanks!)

These past several years, I've tried to inform myself with reading hard facts. It hasn't been fun. But it's been necessary.

The toughest read so far, though, has been that of historian Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening. To remind us of what we must do to turn back this wave of injustice and authoritarianism, she must take us back to where it began and where it accelerated.

To do that, she must bring forward people whom we'd all like to forget: Kellyanne Conway and her comment about "alternative facts"; Chad Wolf; Paul Manafort (especially him, complicit in shenanigans deeper than any of us previously thought); Roger Stone and all his obnoxiousness; and so on. She must remind us of the damage they've done.

Of course, she must also remind us of the ongoing, relentless ugly attempts of ex- to literally take over America and demand unquestioning loyalty to none other than him, the prince of ugliness: conniving, conning, lying, cheating, insulting and law-breaking. By doing so, she exposes the Republican Party as nothing but sycophants, kneeling at his feet, existing only to please and satisfy him--the latter of which can't ever be done, though they are totally blind to it.

And to do that, she must remind us of the events of ex-'s woe begotten term as president, sewn with chaos, most of it intentional. As far as he's concerned, it still goes on incompleted. This time, he knows more about how the enormous weapon of government can be wielded. It has already been reported that he plans vengeance on his enemies, whether real or conjured (with him, it matters not). With the power he can retake, nothing is impossible anymore. Nothing.

So if you've read Richardson's blog posts before, you know what she's going to say or imply strongly: We're in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. The deepest, the greatest threat, since the Civil War.

And the causes are nearly the same: A lot of wealth concentrated in the hands of a privileged few; white supremacy; refusal to accept a valid presidential election result. The difference is that the president was Abraham Lincoln, one of the shrewdest, most intelligent people ever to hold the office. It's tough to imagine someone other than Lincoln trying to advance significant legislation through a Congress torn by secession, one that could be just as distracted as today's.

But then, we don't have Lincoln or anything near that. We have Joe Biden, a good man, though with an image problem of his own. No matter how significant his words might be, too many people aren't listening. They're watching him stumble across daises and walk constantly like, well, an old man, which he is. 

Of course the presidency takes a great deal from a person; of course we can't expect quite the energy with which Biden began his term. But to look at him, the effect of the draining is pronounced. No, the age number itself is irrelevant. What it seems to indicate, though, is telling. It is hard to lead a country as large as ours with deeds alone, which Biden seems to be doing, Image matters, too. Richardson spends no time with this in her book, though.

The only real 20th Century comparison that Richardson makes is to bring in the effects of the presidency of Ronald Reagan--who, ironically, was reported to have lost some of his faculties for the last year and a half, or so, of his second term, which set off a blind, mindless adherence to private business as the solution to all the nation's problems--an adherence which definitely has taken hold today. She's right about that, of course, but doesn't delve deeply into it. Her blog, Letters from An American, occasionally does that, but not here in this book.

That's too bad. We also need a step-by-step rehash of how we got ourselves into the present predicament. That information might be tough to take--the neglect, the naïveté, the numerous cases of overlooking things that we should have taken more seriously. But it has to be considered. It's been a long time since Reagan was president, but his influence has gripped the Republicans like an iron fist. It's been twisted and distorted and manipulated, as many political ideas have. It has left us in an unenviable place.

Democracy Awakening is worth your while. It's impeccably well-researched. Heather Cox Richardson constantly finds a way to connect the past with what we do today in ways that offer a unique but accurate perspective. It is a piece of writing that's gripping reading and required to understand just what kind of debacle we're in. We need it now more than ever.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark