Flashes of Panic

(This is going to be another one of those comment-out-of-control posts that needs to come here to expand to its full, absurdly verbose dimensions.)

This morning I read a bleak view of the younger generation at Sea Fever. Violent video games, homophobia, and hyperactivity. This is different from “Kids today…” head-shaking; it’s fear and apprehension. Just as it’s easy to forget how much things have changed, even in the years since we left college, it’s easy to miss the consequences of those changes and how they’re changing the way kids are growing up. Every so often you read a story in the New York Times about kids’ sexual behavior or relation to technology (cell phones, the internet, video games) and their parents’ apparent cluelessness about the same technology, and you wonder how parents have any control remaining over how their children are formed as people. Yeah, it’s scary, no doubt.

Thing is, when the kids you’re talking about are yours (or, somehow, your responsibility,) the picture changes. You zoom in on the individuals, and things don’t look so bad. Maybe they’re showing you the good side.

A. has been a volunteer assistant coach for the local high school girls’ cross-country team for the last three years. It’s undeniably an unusual team, with forty or fifty girls out every year. (I don’t think we had as many as four girls in any of my years of high school cross-country.) With that many, it’s not surprising that she’s been in contact with girls who are “messed up” in any number of ways. What’s more surprising is the number who aren’t; the number who, despite being smack in the middle of the emotional war zone of the high school years, have their heads securely attached to their shoulders and their eyes firmly on the road. “I don’t know if I like all high school kids,” she said, “but I really like these high school kids.” Having been drafted for various fill-the-gap tasks over the years (“I’m the Clerk Of Course, of course!”) I tend to share that opinion.

Maybe that has a lot to do with this town, which is almost pathologically obsessed with education, a little hothouse for the elite of tomorrow. Maybe it has to do with the kids who come out to run, versus those who might turn out for other sports. (OK, maybe that link has more to do with the town difference than the sport difference, but there’s an echo.) But I think kids really take a vibe from the adults they’re around, much more than we expect, and the vibe these girls get from their coaches is so unmistakably positive, they can’t help but respond well, and there are more than a few adults who make it their job to give kids a positive vibe. It’s just staggering how this team makes all of them, coaches and kids alike, something more than they were when they went in.

There’s more here, but I’ll get to it later…

Now playing: Good News from Dream Harder by The Waterboys