Flashback - Terrifying Children

[This entry comes from not too long ago, August of this year, and was originally titled How to Shade the Truth. As I pointed out, shading the truth to attract viewers or make a political point is both common and cold-hearted.]

Here is a point of view I might want to push: Although there has not been a lot of news lately about school shootings, they are still a major problem. Parents and students alike should still worry about the safety of schools and demand something be done about gun violence.

If I am CNN, I run a headline on July 26, 2019 saying, “There have been 22 school shootings in the US so far this year.” Wow, that is almost one every 10 days!

They define a school shooting as one where someone was hurt or killed and that happened on school property. It includes incidents of accidental discharge and those where the weapon was a BB gun, because they are “potentially lethal.”

Seeing only the headline would cause many to assume that the shootings involved a K-12 student during regular school time. The examples in detail tell a different story.

They are listed in reverse chronological order. The first three happened in school parking lots or playgrounds during summer break. One of the people shot was 36 years old, riding his bike though a high school parking lot. 

The next two victims were a teen shot in the parking lot after a fight broke out, and a 25-year-old man playing basketball at a Chicago elementary school playground.

Four of the incidents happened at Universities, none of them inside buildings. Likewise, of the remaining thirteen incidents, only six actually happened inside a school. One involved a 16-year-old student “trying to buy marijuana from a 17-year-old student.”

The single incident of note was the well-publicized one death and eight injuries at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. “Two male students were charged with murder and attempted murder; one of them told police he sought to target classmates who had bullied him.”

Of course school shootings are bad: one is too many. But let’s be honest about it. There were not 22 since the beginning of the year as most people would understand them. A 46-year-old man shot multiple times by his neighbor in a high school parking lot “amid an ongoing argument over a parking spot” is not really a school shooting in any sense of the term. 

This is the kind of shading and spinning that the media often do to achieve the shock factor desired to retain readership and viewership. It pays to read the rest of the article; it pays to question headlines; it pays to use critical thinking. It especially pays when you know they have a hidden agenda or an incentive to get you all upset – which is always.

[These are not only common but cruel. The 22 in the headline became 6 inside a K-12 school during school hours and only one that fits a commonly held understanding of a school shooting. With over 100,000 public schools in the US, these incidents are exceedingly rare - an impression the news media tries to cover up. What are not rare are headlines like this one: “There are kids who simply are scared to go to school.” How is this practice not a form of child abuse?]

Astrology?

A few weeks ago CBS ran a story about millennials and astrology. The opening paragraph states: “Astrology is booming in popularity, especially among millennials who, according to the American Psychological Association, are among the most stressed Americans. The generation that grew up online is now turning to the ancient practice for help.”

Of course, astrology is not science. Research finds that people born on the same day at the same time do not have the same personality or life experiences. Show people the sort of general descriptions or predictions in a horoscope and they will rate them highly for accuracy, even if they are generated randomly. The mass of a person sitting next to you has a greater gravitational effect than all the planets combined.

Is this growing interest, booming popularity, a sign of poor critical thinking? 

I was ready to be discouraged about another example of behavioral failure until my research led me to a piece from early last year in The Atlantic called, “The New Age of Astrology.” They repeat that although there is “no evidence” to back any claims, astrology seems to provide some relief from a “combination of stress and uncertainty about the future.” Young people especially “find comfort and insight in the zodiac – even if they don’t exactly believe in it.” It can be meaningful and unreal at the same time. In this age of comfort animals and New Age mystical trends, astrology helps people remain calm.

There is a pattern here that goes deeper than astrology. Earlier this year, “American Psychology Association (APA) reported in their annual Stress in America survey that millennials are the most stressed generation.”

Huffington Post in April 2017 reported: Both Gen-X and Millennials “report nearly twice the level of stress that’s considered safe from serious health risk…and it’s affecting their children.” [Emphasis in the original.]

Time, October 2018, wrote: “Members of Gen Z – people ages 15 to 21 – reported the worst mental health of any generation” according to that year’s APA report.

That young people feel stressed is not hard to understand. It comes down to increased speed and reach of communications and the commoditization of audience, not to actual facts. Fifty years ago there were hurricanes, fires, the cold war and political scandals. There were drills in schools (for nuclear attacks), drugs, crime, poverty, bullying and social pressures. In the seventies there was even talk of climate change – another ice age – and don’t forget the oil crisis.

One reason the Boomer generation made it through was the absence of hyperbole and hysteria today delivered 24/7 on handheld devices with the express purpose of keeping the audience intensely engaged. Since then the standard of living has soared, the crime rate is down, there is less war and poverty in the world, families are smaller and houses are bigger. Modern conveniences – dish washers, microwaves, home air conditioning, cell phones, more reliable vehicles and many more – are both taken for granted and allow more time to worry. 

Favorable violent crime and murder trends, longer life expectancies, and diseases cured or prevented by vaccines are not emphasized, leaving the false impression that conditions are growing worse. Reporters give breathless accounts of tragedies and disasters all over the world, as they show graphic pictures and interviews with crying survivors. Thoughtful reporting has been replaced by each new and exciting item of “breaking news” to accommodate a short, Sesame-Street-fostered, attention span. Rumors and opinions from single unverified sources are treated as facts. Exceedingly rare incidents, child abductions and school shootings, are blown out of proportion. Constantly exposing a young captive audience to dire predictions of climate disasters, eyewitness accounts of shootings, pictures of terrorist attacks is bound to drive a sense of insecurity. 

Words are considered weapons. Incidental touching is assault. Every stranger is a potential abuser or abductor. Being offended has become the national pastime sometimes resulting in death threats against the offender. Ordinary life has become a legal mine field leading to the need for more insurance, warning labels, permission slips, hold harmless agreements and institutional overreaction to minor infractions. 

All this naturally leads to an atmosphere of safety paranoia where anxious parents overprotect frightened children.

Politicians have driven the country into opposing camps, painting the other party as a stupid or evil enemy, stressing dire consequences if they come to power. The press then promotes worst-case interpretations to further their interests. Thus everything has become political, and the best way to manipulate people is to use children as pawns by showing them as the ultimate victims and by terrifying them into carrying forth the message. 

Calm voices are ignored. Is it any wonder that a younger generation feels stressed, with constant messages of anxiety exacerbated by the misuse of increasingly powerful technology? The panicky voices, heart wrenching stories, the warnings of overblown dangers and threats expressed by the government, parents, teachers, advertisers and advocates were not something they could adapt to. They were brought up on this dystopian garbage and expected, even encouraged, to participate.

Interest in astrology by Millennials is not something to be mocked as lack of critical thinking by them. It’s their refuge from a world of unjustified panic resulting from a pattern of abandoning critical thinking and insistence on the truth.

Child Abuse Awareness

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. One objective is to raise awareness of child abuse issues. Certainly this includes instilling fear in children to promote one’s ego or enforce one’s authority. But doesn’t instilling fear in a child to promote one’s political agenda have the same detrimental effect?

Take for example the incident a few weeks ago when a number of young children were driven to Dianne Feinstein office to persuade her to vote in favor of the Green New Deal. Most of the media attention was on the Senator trying to dodge the questions with little notice to the state of the children. They were afraid and panicky – and they didn’t get that way on their own. It likely came from parents more concerned about the environment than children’s immediate mental health and wellbeing.

One young girl says, “We have come to a point where our earth is dying!” Isn’t planting an idea like that in a child’s mind and encouraging it to grow also a form of abuse?

 A similar situation arises from pictures of polar bears. The Weather Channel headline reads: “Heartbreaking Photos Show Stranded Polar Bears Floating on Ice.” A quote from an Italian photographer (not a scientist) follows: “I believe the survival of this species on high arctic islands is strictly related to sea ice," although he “actually found more bears than he expected.”

The fact is that polar bears are at home in and around water. “Polar bears are pretty strong swimmers – probably the strongest of all the land-based predators. They will spend much of their time in swimming and thus they are sometimes referred to as marine mammals.” Most such pictures show them on one of many ice floes looking stranded, but they are able to swim 60 to 70 miles in open water. “The longest distance covered by any polar bear in swimming is about 427 miles…. She swam for up to 9 days continuously through the Beaufort Sea...” Stranded, indeed!

Another source questions the fuss about them being endangered when the “polar bear populations have been increasing overall since the 1970s.” The fuss, of course, is that polar bears are an example of charismatic macro-fauna. They look sweet and cuddly (from a distance) and, like orphan children in those charity solicitations, easily tug at our hearts, encouraging us to turn off our critical thinking. This effect is strong on children who can put pressure on their parents to support various causes. Isn’t such manipulation also abuse?

Finally, school shootings are a terrible blight on the country, but does that justify the number of children who are scared to go to school? The LA Times refers to the “prevalence of school shootings,” as schools lock doors, arm teachers, conduct drills and come up with all kinds of countermeasures to what is really a fairly rare event – despite anxious news coverage. Meanwhile politicians play on the fear to renew calls for additional gun restrictions.

There are over 132,000 schools in the US with about 55 million students.

The average number of school shootings per year since 2000 (including last year, a statistical anomaly) has been 36.6 resulting in about 20.2 deaths per year (not all students) according to the CDC. They add that among youth aged 5-18, “between 1% and 2% of [homicide] deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school.”

The full CDC report (Table 6: Number of deaths from selected causes, by age: United States, 2016) gives more information. The age breaks in the table are different, stopping at 14 rather than 18, but it allows for a reasonable estimate of deaths from other causes to compare to the 20.2 shown above: Flu, 356; Motor Vehicle Accidents, 1455; Accidental discharge of firearms, 74; Accidental drowning and submersion, 708.

The chance of a child being killed in any other situation is 50 to 100 times greater than by a firearm in school, at a school activity or traveling to or from school. Many other threats are also greater. Yet this is what we scare our kids about. Maybe it’s time to start ignoring the theatrics of the news media and teach our children to exercise some critical thinking and perspective.

Maybe also it’s time to extend the definition of child abuse to include terrifying children, intentionally or unintentionally, with unreasonable fear in order to push political agendas.