This
Journal

October
1999

This morning my second period joined the massed throng of sophomores and freshmen in the auditorium to watch a dramatic presentation associated with Red Ribbon Week. A four-person group called Silence.com managed to hold the attention of this crowd with a fast-paced, somewhat unfocused but well-written collage around all of the Big Tough Issues.

While Red Ribbon Week sends a pretty straight-forward anti-drug message, this performance treated drug use as only one of many pressure points in teenage life (others included date rape, domestic violence and sexual abuse, stereotyping, alcoholism, suicide, and the self-image-monster tag team of anorexia and bulimia). The message was: "If you find yourself trapped in one of these situations, Get Help." A good message.

Being new to this campus, I'm not sure about the atmosphere here; but I'm assuming from the little I've heard that Carmel's population is not immune to any of these problems. I have no doubt that many of the strangers I encounter in these halls each day are struggling with these issues. So an hour-long presentation that tries to reach them in a meaningful way is not such a bad thing. But you never know what's going to last. (Rocco calls these anti-drug awareness programs "dog and pony shows". They are cute, captivate the attention, make you laugh and make you cry; but what real difference do they make in behaviors? Not much, says Rocco. Though I say it's still a message worth hearing, better than silence, a good supplement to other ongoing deeper-reaching school programs - but not a substitute for them.)

Just last night at dinner, Larry Clark's film Kids came into the conversation. This, to my mind, is the all-time creepiest horror film (forget all that Hollywood Halloweenoid fun). This film presents the in-your-face horror of kids without boundaries. As with any work in the horror genre, there's a certain necessary exaggeration for effect; but we get no Mummy, no Creature, no Freddy - not even a Norman Bates. We just get a crowd of kids living on the surface as if there were no depths, bouncing around the city doing whatever they please, whatever they can. And that's plenty. Kubrick stylized similar material in the circus-baroque of A Clockwork Orange. Clark just lays it out in nauseous cinema verité. Utterly horrific. Some would say we do not need art like this. I'm not going to get into that tonight.

Yet I turn from these thoughts to the image of kids in a room silently reading a book about kids coming of age in the South sixty years ago. In some ways it's a gentle book, in others quite brutal. But here they are, many of them sunk into that deep space behind the words, lost in that other world. It's a hopeful image because some of them, I tell myself, are discovering that inner place where their own soul lives. That's why I push literature.

At the end of one period I look up from my own reading and ask, "Do you find this story to be kind of funny?" They answer, "No, not really; we don't get it. But you were laughing, Brother Tom. Yeah, we heard you." And it's true; I had been emitting tiny explosive giggles. I'm not surprised they don't get it. Most of the humor comes from the adult narrator's wry observations, usually couched in sardonic adult diction. "Too many big words," they say. I say, "Yeah, too many big words."

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah 11:6.