Mud six inches thick. It swallows your ankles and threatens to take your knees too. Every step is a comprehensive bodily effort. Finally, some drier mud to sit on. Buzzing overhead. That’s the sound of bullets. Every few seconds a whistling sound and then an explosion and dirt flies everywhere. It’s difficult to see with the smoke. Another corpse missing two legs and a head. The blood and mud mingle into a dark muck. It’s just another day in the trenches.
My favorite show comes on in three minutes. “Hey mom, is dinner ready yet? I’m gonna eat in here.” Cool breeze. That’s the air condition. It’s Monday and can’t wait for the weekend. Nothing to do but chill and watch tv. Maybe go out with friends and catch a movie, maybe play pool. It’s just another day in my palace.
Both are happening simultaneously in the lives of American teenagers. The war wages on and yet many of them live like royalty with a parent to serve them.
I am still young, but I am just high enough on the “age-hill” to look back on my teenage years with some bewilderment. I have mixed feelings about those years. Some times I refer to my teenage years as my own personal “Dark Ages,” which is completely accurate – however, I do not think historically speaking it is accurate to call the medieval period the “Dark Ages,” but that’s another matter entirely. When I look back on my teenage years, I have no clue how I made it out alive and in one piece, albeit I took some shrapnel in both my legs and my chest, metaphorically speaking of course. I think I made it out alive by some stroke of luck or providence, whichever you prefer. In either case, I feel as though I had little to do with it.
It strikes me as rather strange that those few years can make or break a person’s life. Or perhaps those years do not make or break a person’s life, but those years impact the trajectory of a person’s life to a large extent.
It would almost seem that I should run around to every teenager I see to tell them that they just need to try to survive those teenage years doing as few puerile things as possible lest they be swept away into dark ally ways and dank dungeons for the rest of their lives; and it will be for the rest of their lives that they have to think about it.
It’s survival. It’s life in the trenches and bullets are buzzing overhead. One peak over the crest of the trench and that could be the end. It’s life in a palace and one too many movies and you might wake up eighty-five years old without a credit to your name, apart from successfully asking your parents for gas money.
Yet it seems impossible for an American teenager to realize the profundity of their predicament. Needless to say that is why so many take a peek over the crest of the trench to be met with a cold metal bullet between the eyes. That is why so many seep into their late twenties playing video games for the majority of their days. Thus, it is these formative teenage years that strike me as most scary, scary because though there are many things to worry about in my pseudo-adulthood it’s the teenagers who are in the trenches and do not even realize it. That’s the scariest aspect of all: that they do not even realize they are in the trenches! And they seem incapable of realizing it. They dance along the edge of a knife without a care, for they haven’t a clue that one misstep will cut them in two – imagine the trajectory of that. They tap-dance on the edge of a cliff as if they are in the prime of their life with little to nothing at stake. And yet everything is stake!
What then is to be done? Maybe a bulletproof vest to start?
Again, I must emphasize that I am a young and naïve seminary student with little experience outside of school. However, I must add that I have some experience in the teenage trenches as well as the teenage palaces. And those years were not so long ago for me, though they seem like a lifetime ago.
Sometimes the best thing to do when you’re lost is to get a guide who knows the territory. Those who survived those formative years might try to partner up with those who are still in the trenches and seemed to have lost their way. It’s not much, but it is a start.
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