relatable messages we tune out, inadvertently, the messages that those few diamonds send to us. These jewels could be from any genre, written at any time in history and with any tolerable rhythm.
A few years ago, the Offspring put out a song called “The Kids Aren’t Alright.” If anyone missed the motivation behind writing a song like that, and they have heard the song before, their attention was probably elsewhere when it came on the radio. Its theme is too obvious and too pertinent to listeners to be ignored.
It talks about those times when the singer was younger, when all the kids on his “whole damn street was gonna make it big” in every way. But so quickly it starts singing about all those kids’ lives slowly then surely falling apart. References in the video to joblessness, hopelessness, drugs, premature death and suicide quickly make for an eerie and ironic theme that has an upbeat Alternative rhythm and the saddest lyrics such a band could incorporate in its music.
But do we ever think about those songs to the point that we allow them to resonate with us. How is something like this, a seven-year-old ballad from the last throws of the golden 90s age of music, going to hit me so hard when none of this has ever happened to me?
It probably has happened to you, and just as you tuned out the lyrics of this lamentation, you have tuned out all those stories about those kids from high school that some people did not quite get or suddenly dropped out of class. Beneath the piles of homework and college applications, plus eventually the new life at your university itself, lies a past dotted with tragedies that you have simply put out of your mind.
Eventually they catch up with you. The rumors begins to circulate about that friend you lost touch with from high school. You wonder what might be going on and you shallowly try once to call him, or sent a quick email asking how her life is going. Then you find have to hear the news. She hanged herself. Her brother found her, and her family is now one child short. That girl you may have had as one of your close friends for a period of time is gone. She no longer exists.
But the biggest individual tragedy is hiding what is happening to the rest of the old circles of friends from those days. You hear about those kids collapsing in college, the kid who couldn’t quite make that dream position he wanted and fell apart, the person who ended up in rehab and is a shadow of her former self. “What the hell is going on?!”
Just think about this. Your life’s main characters are being killed off. A person who had always been there has lost all hope and maybe all chance at living the life she could have lived. The person whose smiles and tears you saw so much is now non-existent, decaying in a grave or dust in an urn. Those “fragile lives and shattered dreams” are not confined to the broken urban neighborhoods; they are tearing apart your suburbs and loved friends, their families and destroying lives. WHO EVER THINKS ABOUT THESE THINGS?!
Who ever lets this rip through their emotions?! Who ever thinks about how tears apart those who had lived their lives around these people?! Why does no one allow themselves to let these thoughts and feelings sink in? If everyone started to appreciate the magnitude of these events in others’ lives, just as it shredding the livelihoods of those others, imagine how much more appreciation for the value of human life we would all have!
I heard about that person who hanged herself. I just had that best friend who barely survived her attempt at suicide and is in rehab. Will she ever be the same person, that amazing girl who can read past the 3rd grade level and walk on her own? I do not know. I can only hope. Yet there is so much more I can do and am doing. I wonder if everyone else is doing the same.
The greatest charity is to initiate the preservation of life, and setting my life around that goal comes from those things that almost got me down when I was younger: being bullied, being on the outside, feeling frustrated, depressed and hopeless. I told myself nothing was permanent and struggled to find my nitch. Few people are lucky enough to be successful in recovering, in such a way without therapy and without more challenges along the way.
We can build stronger foundations for stronger lives for the people who will have to face these same challenges in the future. We can try as much as we possibly can to eliminate those obstacles, and we can get far by doing that. I want to go into economic development for the sake of helping those people who will be in those problematic social situations. And I should hope the desire and motivation to prevent those things that are going to hurt individuals and the society of which they are apart come out of these types of emotional whirlwinds these experiences create.
But also bear in mind many of these obstacles are unavoidable. We should become stronger as people. Not by hiding our insecurities and becoming easily offended by the slightest off-color comment, but by acknowledging them. This is simple basic therapeutic advice, but it is so often ignored. Society’s problems come from the people who either ignore these tragedies are going on, or hide the agony that these tragedies cause. These things are going to happen, and we are better off acknowledging them and the pain they cause to make us all better people.
יהי רצון מלפניך ה' אלוקי ואלוקי אבותי, שתשלך מהרה רפואה שלמה מן השמים רפואה נפש ורפואה הגוף לחולה ג'ולי מיראנדה אם חולי ישראל. ב"סד
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