CURRENT NEEDS
Outright praise, encouragement and clear-cut examples are greatly needed today to help young people avoid peer patterns which are deceptively enticing and dangerous.
It is past time for older men and women to refute our self-protecting tendencies to condemn all young people for those actions in which a few of them choose to take part.
The recent high school"prom" hazing case in the Midwest is typical of the sort of extravagant conduct in which young people seem to think they can grow to be adults. Hazing has long been a means of establishing lordship among groups of people and it is claimed to be a means whereby ones maturity and virility is proved to be worthy of belonging to the group. Primitive tribes practiced it in some very harsh and life-endangering forms. Our today, except then influenced by the use of drugs in pill or liquid forms, and other such factors, is, generally, intended to stay on a less threatening level. It can become very easy for it to slip across the lines of decency and safety.
The Illinois case will go through a series of judgmental proceedure including legal court actions, semi-legal opinions and statements by nosey individuals, religious and social groups who sit in judgment of others and most trying of all – the court of public opinion trial by media by media presentation.
On of the most remarkable facets of this particular case, to me, was the fact that the entire thing was being videotaped. The frenzied filth flingers were certinlyy aware of that the camera was going with suitable lighting provided. Logic would have dictated that the gang turn on the camera wielder and give him or her the worst treatment possible. I fact, that they did not do so suggests they were actively fulfilling a leading role... even to cooperating with the video person in raising their beer cups and bottles in a pyramid over the slime cover bodies of the girls on the ground.
There is more than just"“hazing" involved. Role playing is apart of it all and they play those roles with which they are kept abreast of through our current entertainment levels.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that the doers of the dirty deeds, did not turn on the camera person and beat his or her into the filth about them? Instead, they chose to complete the roles they were playing.
The injustice associated with the entire story is that these were a few individuals apart from the the larger body of honest, decent, considerate and worthy young. To treat the participants in the prom as quasi hero idols is totally wrong.
Let's deal with the thing in a legal sense, then drop it. Put it away in the deepest landfill to be found and get on with the needed, more positive recognition of that which is good in our young people.
They need encouragement. A brighter road.
And, we need to be more alert to the precise nature of the examples we may cause to be placed before them.
A.L.M. May 25, 2003 [c827wds]
