Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy

Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy: Be afraid. be very afraid

When I started this project of reflecting on the new insights and experiences I am having as a septuagenarian, I did not imagine that I would be writing about politics. But recently, I have been thinking about this statement I heard a couple of years ago-- "Grandmothers are the conscience of a culture."

So with that in mind, this Bubbe cannot remain silent.

One of the advantages of being over seventy is that not only can we remember the past, we now have the ability to connect the dots with things that are happening now and share those connections with younger people.

I have been aware of the echoes of the 1930's in the age of trump, but I have not written about it in my personal writing.

But the story that I just read in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an incident at a Malvern middle school has set off all of my internal alarms.

Everything about this story makes me sick sick sick - physically. emotionally and spiritually. If I had been a teacher in this school, I would have found it very hard to walk back into the building and face these children ( and their coddling parents and the lame administration) for even one more day.

This story is a microcosm for so many things wrong in our culture right now. And while it may seem that I am "blaming" the middle school kids, I am not. I am condemning their behavior, but I am also very aware that they live in the world we adults made and they are merely reflecting our own values and behavior back to us.

I have grandchildren this age and I have been watching how they are coming into their own at adolescence in the age of trump. First thing to remember is that these middle schoolers are post-pandemic children. Most of them spent at least one school year at home in front of computers at their kitchen tables instead of in classrooms full of other children. They lost precious months or more of socialization skills. Some could have experienced the deaths of parents or grandparents -- let's not forget that over one MILLION Americans died from Covid or Covid related illnesses.

There is also ample research to show that many of these children have suffered emotional distress and had their intellectual and social development truncated by isolation.

I was also deeply troubled by where this horrific incident occurred - in Malvern, Pa, a comfortable Philadelphia suburb just a few miles down the Main Line from where I raised my children and where two of my grandchildren live. I know these kids and their families. And I can imagine a scenario similar to this happening just about anywhere in this country in these times.

People who have heard or read about this are most appalled by what they see as a lack of empathy. And while I agree about the troubling nature of the students' lack of feeling for their teachers and their families ( and their lack of true remorse -- you can't feel remorse if you don't fully understand what you did was wrong) what troubles me the most is the young people's facility with creating deep fakes and propagating lies and willful disinformation. These lies about their teachers ( including accusations of pedophilia) and fakes ( including creating fake accounts in their teachers' names and pasting teachers' faces to others' bodies in sexual acts) were then uploaded to Tik Tok where they were consumed and shared by other children.

So much is wrong with this. The affects of social media on the mental health of children for one. The ignorance of the parents who apparently weren't keeping a tight reign and sharp eye on their children's on line activity. The school's lax response and the "sorry if you didn't find this funny, where's your sense of humor" so called apology by two of the young perpetrators.

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Can you think of other incidents of someone writing nasty, untrue things about others and sharing it to social media? How about someone who tells outrageous lies and then claims it was just a joke? Or someone who has not one shred of empathy or feeling for anyone other than himself?

These are trump's new American children. These are his disciples, and the worst part is, they don't even know how they have been shaped and manipulated into being unfeeling liars and purveyors of disinformation.

This is the generation that trump and MAGA have wrought.

It's not a coincidence that Project 2025 includes abolishing the Department of Education. Or why Republicans in some states have wrested control of the curriculum and made teaching about our past a crime. Or the governors who want to make teaching the Bible part of the curriculum or requiring teacher to place posters of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. These people talk about liberals and progressives "grooming" children with absolutely no irony or self awareness about their own agenda.

I taught public school for thirty five years. There were always a few students who didn't "like" me or disagreed with how or what I taught. I shudder to think what might have happened to me had my students had access to something like Tik Tok where they could have taken out their anger at me on social media. Long after I retired, I had nightmares about one of my angry white boy students secretly recording me teaching Beloved and sending the tapes to Tucker Carlson.

But this attack on the teachers in Malvern feels different. It doesn't seem political. In some ways it doesn't even seem personal, because in order for something to be personal, you'd have to acknowledge the victims' humanity.

I have been criticized over the past eight years for making connections between the rise of our new waveAmerican Fascism to Adolph Hitler, the Nazis, the Third Reich. That criticism has waned since January 6th as trump and his supporters’ true plans for our country have become clearer.

People have awakened to his authoritarianism, his misogyny, his racism, his lawlessness and his craven hedonism.

But this story of these upper middle class kids in a toney Philadelphia suburb is emblematic of something even more troubling. Why was it possible for Hitler to gain as much power as he did between 1933 and 1939?

Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls became popular in 1933 to indoctrinate young people into Nazi principles. This organized effort turned young people into adults who would do the genocidal work of the Nazi party as young adults. They were trained to serve the needs and desires of the Führer and Third Reich.

The Final Solution was carried out by people who had been indoctrinated into a murderous ideology when they were adolescents.

And a major part of that ideology was the dehumanization of those whom the government wanted to destroy. Jews were not people, they were vermin -- making them so much easier to exterminate.

Trump's use of these kinds of terms for immigrants from "shithole countries" as well as blanket accusations of rape, murder, drug dealing and pedophilia mirror Nazi propaganda tactics.

It's easy and perhaps comforting to say, "They're just kids, they don't know what they are doing."

But we do. We know exactly what they are doing using social media to malign their teachers and spread dangerous lies. And we also know where this behavior is being modeled.

All we have to do is follow (non) Truth Social.

The inability or unwillingness of the press and media to call out trump for his lies and to give him a platform for his disinformation and false claims about his perceived enemies has created a climate where anything goes. It is increasingly harder to know and speak what is true and just and humane.

We each are on our own to call this behavior out and to keep repeating how this is not the country we want to live in.

Adolescents are particularly desirous of peer approval making it really hard for those who know better to speak up and dissent.

I am sure the parents of these students would be very upset with me for comparing this incident to incipient Hitler Youth like behavior. But it has to be viewed in the larger context of what is happening in our country at this particular inflection point.

Brushing this off as youthful indiscretion and not taking seriously the underlying issues and the larger political context in which these young people are coming of age, will only insure that the mantle of trumpism, white Christian Nationalism, racism, misogyny, anti-science, anti intellectualism and autocracy will be passed down to the next generation.

What do you think? I am open to hearing other perspectives on this and I hope to write more about it after dialoging with others.

For now, these are my first thoughts, trying to take a Janus perspective -- looking back at the past while also looking ahead to the future.

We have to do better.