How does a young man turn into radicalized?
Is there a precise moment when he shifts from offended, alienated teenager to sociopathic murderer? Does a switch get flipped? When does he make that call to kill?
Yesterday’s violence on the University of Virginia was just yet one more in a protracted string of mass shootings by young men in america. And yet we still don’t all the time have strategies for how one can take care of the chance or the aftermath of such events.
As a Catholic educator at an all-male highschool and someone who spends nearly all of his days interacting with teenage boys, I find myself pondering loads about these uncomfortable questions—and imagining what part my classroom might play in combating such troubling trends toward extremism and violence.
“All these shootings,” said one other student, “one after one other. I feel like I’m going crazy. Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”
Once I read the rage-filled manifesto the Buffalo shooter left behind in May, I could see in front of me the horrific role that bad ideas and isolation can play in a young man’s development. His words were a splatter-shot of shared memes, conspiracy theories and racist indoctrination, all of it perpetuated by a proliferation of dangerous, disembodied voices crying out online and within the media. I could almost picture these ideas taking hold of this young man’s lonely mind. Feeding on his wounds, giving oxygen to his resentments, fertilizing his anger. Growing and expanding until they overpowered each his humanity and his capability for connection.
My thoughts then immediately turn to my very own students. Could any of them be able to something like this?
Never, I quickly think to myself. My students routinely turn in lost money to the front office. They’re polite and compassionate. They hold doors and work in soup kitchens. They’re Eagle Scouts and altar servers.
At the identical time, I can be lying if I said there haven’t been one or two over the past decade I’ve frightened about. Quiet, strange, particularly offended young men who’ve caused me to knock on our college counselor’s door and voice my concern. Even amongst students about whom I don’t have these larger worries, I can be lying if I said I haven’t felt their emotions becoming more strained and unpredictable over the past three years.
What role can schools play in helping decrease the quantity of gun violence we are going to all should endure?
Where we’re
Last spring, within the wake of so many consecutive mass shootings, an odd energy enveloped our campus. Underneath the facade of ultimate faculty meetings and grade submissions, our nerves were becoming frayed, our anxiety pushed to the brink. First I noticed more heads resting on desks during my lessons. Some students stopped showering. Video game addiction continued to spiral uncontrolled. Faces were buried in social media feeds before, during and after homeroom. I ended taking students’ cell phones since it was becoming a full-time job.
Then colleagues of mine began breaking down; in a number of instances, it happened in front of their students. I noticed teachers expressing real fear of their students, and for the primary time in my ten-year teaching profession, I had to interrupt up a fistfight in my very own classroom.
As graduation approached, it felt like we were all walking on eggshells, tip-toeing our strategy to the finish line. “Please, God,” we prayed, “just give us the strength to make it to June.”
After the Uvalde shooting, I made a decision to throw out my curriculum map for a number of days and provides my students some much-needed space to breathe, share and connect with one another. I began off the conversation just by asking them how they were holding up.
“Is that this a latest trend now?” wondered a freshman out loud. “Crazy folks running into places and targeting innocent people? Why does this keep happening?”
“All these shootings,” said one other, “one after one other. I feel like I’m going crazy. Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”
As our conversations progressed, we shared about identity, the role of college in a healthy society and the meaning of friendship, in addition to our own struggles with spirituality, religious disaffiliation and mental health.
“I’ve been exposed to a lot noise,” noted a junior, “I can’t tell which ideas are mine anymore.”
“Drugs, violence, porn,” said a senior, “it’s turn into so normalized, I’m having a tough time deciding what’s good for me. It’s like I can’t tell what’s healthy and what’s not.”
Other students shared about decreased motivation and repetitive, anxious thoughts. They’d questions on God, technology and the very purpose of their lives. They were staying up at night, obsessing about perception, self and truth. Watching YouTube clips, numbing out on entertainment, DMing, posting, liking, scrolling. Anything to maintain the demons of their minds at bay.
“If I wanted, I could find horrifying images and racist tirades in lower than five minutes,” one in every of my juniors informed me, holding up his phone to prove his point.
“I could probably buy a gun,” one other noted off-handedly. Neither statement surprised me. These young men are exposed to so many harmful ideas, horrific points of view, disturbing images and opinions— it’s no wonder their heads are exploding.
What can the Twenty first-century educator offer his or her students within the wake of all this violence, anger and hate? What role can schools play in helping decrease the quantity of gun violence we are going to all should endure?
One of the best we will do without delay is listen. We can provide students the space to air out bad ideas, reach insights and come across accidental truths. We will set parameters of trust and model compassion. How we go about creating these opportunities for depth and connection, nevertheless, would require tremendous risk, self-awareness and courage. To that end, listed here are three strategies which have worked for me.
“Drugs, violence, porn,” said a senior, “it’s turn into so normalized, I’m having a tough time deciding what’s good for me. It’s like I can’t tell what’s healthy and what’s not.”
Strategy one: Voice your fears.
Once I began having these conversations with my students, I used to be terrified. Would I be punished for veering too far off the lesson plan? Would I say the improper thing? Offend a parent? Would I get canceled? Fired? I made a decision that quite than bury my fears, I’d come clean about them.
“We’re attempting to work out our own ideas,” I said to my students, “we will disagree, we will get upset, but let’s make the commitment that, irrespective of what our views, we’re going to respect each other. We’re going to present one another the good thing about the doubt, and we’re going to hearken to what people should say.” This is usually a counter-cultural, scary proposition. But after several of those conversations, and intense, triggering disagreements about God, gun laws and gender, I actually have never had a single parent complain. I did, nevertheless, receive many more thanks notes from students last spring than in any of my previous nine years as a teacher. What all of them said was some version of “Thanks for caring about us.”
Strategy two: Get support.
I invited our Director of Diversity to take a seat in on as a lot of these classroom conversations as he could. He helped provide the guardrails and ground our conversations, but mostly he helped me feel protected. Watching how he interacted with the scholars, having countless conversations with him after school, simply seeing him at a desk within the corner of the room—these experiences gave me the arrogance to trust the method without trying to regulate the conversation with my very own cautious views and simple, Hallmark-card theology. I had someone in my corner with whom I could process my very own anxieties and missteps (and consider me, there have been plenty!). Since the safer we feel with one another, the higher we will listen.
Saint Teresa of Ávila: “Humility is the ointment of our wounds,” and if we’ve got it, then “the surgeon, who’s our Lord, will come to heal us.”
Strategy three: Pray.
Before each classroom conversation, I’d pray silently, asking God to assist me listen with compassion, to support the discussion in a spirit of affection and tolerance, to grant the boys enough grace to seek out their very own voice and discernment amidst a lot cultural static and confusion. In other words, I prayed to remain out of the best way.
When you find yourself petrified of an consequence, your prayers turn into loads more meaningful, and in that expression of humility and powerlessness, our relationship with God becomes far more authentic. For as Saint Teresa of Ávila tells us in The Interior Castle, “Humility is the ointment of our wounds,” and if we’ve got it, then “the surgeon, who’s our Lord, will come to heal us.”
That has definitely been my experience.
Amid a lot grief and loss, there stays opportunity. A possibility for young people to grasp, at an experiential level, what Catholics mean once we discuss koinonia, communion. As I see it, communion is the one antidote to all this madness, and within the face of apathetic laws and a corrupt political system, the lecture rooms of the Twenty first century might turn into that vital shelter of kinship, depth and understanding in a sea of radical ideas and offended online tirades. A port within the storm of teenage anxiety, isolation and rage.
“You would like not be desiring to learn the entire world,” Teresa once more teaches us, “but focus on those that are in your organization, and thus your deed shall be greater since you might be more obliged toward them.” The young men I teach are the souls to whom I’m obliged, the community to which I’m accountable. And as this demographic continues to be such a worrisome group for our society, I pray for the religion and discernment, the courage and creativity it’ll little question require to create vital spaces of communion and healing.