Current Affair Comment by Owl Owl was pecking around for something light-hearted to spring us into the new year when the stark news of the serial suicides of young people in a Welsh town made a stronger bid for comment. Naturally we hear of ‘questions being asked’ so that ‘lessons can be learned’ – that useless sort of thing. But these tragic actions, which have left families and friends bereft, are frighteningly thought to be attracting emulation. Locally other young people confess to having ‘thought about it.’ The explanations offered are along predictable lines: ‘Nothing exciting for us to do at nights’ . . . ‘Few career opportunities’. This is far from a classic anomie, however. The vacuum, abhorred, gets filled. In the virtual world to which all the young have instant access, lives can be constructed, shared, empathised with – lived in fact. Fact, or fiction? We all walk around constantly ‘writing’ our mental autobiography. Some of us do more romanticising than others. But the revelation that immature young people are setting up their own ‘memorial pages’ on internet ‘social’ sites and posting illiterate messages to the memory of their departed peers is truly sinister. ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die . . .’ – in Owl’s generation that was a wonderful line for doleful adolescent who had been ticked off, again, for untidiness or indolence. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .’ Properly educated, we could plod to school wallowing in Keats and a sense of injustice, yet we didn’t react by stringing ourselves up with our school ties. Maybe there’s a vacuum of logic here which Sea of Faith and the like-minded should be making more effort to fill. Reading what the young of Bridgend say makes it clear that they see suicide as the entry to another virtual world even nicer than Facebook or Bebo. It’s a ‘better place’, where, it’s implied, no effort is required of them, and where they and their friends stay forever young.
It would be as unfair to blame Welsh Chapel tradition for underwriting this fiction as it would to blame the Muslim paradise for beardless suicide bombers. The ‘happy land’ hymns of existence ‘above the bright blue sky’ are not sung in schools any more. The ‘sweet chariot’ is mysteriously invoked only as a vehicle for the gods of rugby. But where in our educational and nurturing institutions is there a place for encouraging the developing mind to deal with human birth, life and death along logical as well as imaginative lines, and to show the difference? Whose job is it? The parents’, of course: they nearly all manage to see that their offspring enjoy Santa Claus as real, then ‘real’! When it comes to God and Heaven, however, they expect ‘school’ to do the needful, if they think about it at all. So where is this ‘skill’ on the National Curriculum tick-list? You’re right – there’s no space anywhere for reflection on such topics, for the kind of classroom discussion which used to open windows of imagination and give adolescent fears and misapprehensions a good airing.
Teachers now run a mile from anything unscripted.
Youth workers are undermanned in the frantic business of setting up ‘activities’ to keep the young off the streets and out of Facebook. Almost all are untrained in anything resembling theology or philosophy.
And the Church . . .? Well it usually still has a hand in the funerals, and maybe is a comfort on the whole.
It’s not doing the ‘facts of life’ job, though, often out of fear rather than hypocrisy. The tabloids are quick to smell out and demonise any thinking that might just ‘undermine faith’. Meanwhile youngsters apostrophise their dead friends in bleak blogs – and a grown man, lost in psychotic fog, walks off a hotel balcony with his two children ‘to heaven’, where he is now sure his dead son resides, presumably forever a boy. So who is left carrying the torch for grown-up thinking? Pullman and Rowling, of course! But they are writing fiction.
A girl from Bridgend who said, ‘I’ve thought about it’ was talking about the suicides, but concluded ‘I would never be so selfish.’ Food for thought, and action?
A reader enquired if Owl was the Editor. Owl is not the Editor. To wit Owl is independent.