In college, I was an English major. I love reading almost any kind of book from any era (with the exception of Victorian literature, sorry, Ms. Austen and Misses Bronte), but I concentrated that study around early 20th-century literature (think Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Italo Svevo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, who is my least favorite of them all but pretty much required reading in any English curriculum). I loved it. I barely looked at my literature classes as class at all, I loved reading and I loved discussing the books with people who were equally interested. It's probably the thing I miss the most about college, honestly (besides being able to live off pizza and Starbucks and weigh easily 20 pounds less).
In college, I also suffered from depression of varying severities. Sometimes, it was a low hum, deep, deep down that didn't interrupt my ability to function but was nonetheless there, and letting me know it could rise up at any time and bring my normal life to a screeching halt. It was during those times, those other times, that life came to a standstill and simple acts like taking a shower or going to class or talking to my friends required intense, focused effort that left me exhausted.
It was during a particularly prolonged period of "those other times" when I knew I had to do something to break the hold it had on me before something awful happened, so I told my mother about how bad things had gotten, which she was mostly unaware of because I was living two hours away at school.
I remember the day I told her, I had come into her room one Saturday morning while she was still in bed and laid at the foot of the bed and just let it all spill out unevenly with no real narrative or timeline, because if I tried to plan what I was going to say or thought too much about it, I was going to chicken out. Admitting you're depressed, and admitting that you can't "just deal with it," can feel like a failure of sorts (even though it's very much not) and I've never been good with my own failure.
After I said my piece, she asked a few questions. After I gave my answers, she said (as any Math major might), "I don't want you reading all those depressing books for a while."
I remember laughing and saying, "If I don't read anything written by a depressed person I won't be able to graduate."
I then explained to her that by reading those books which featured characters of shall we say "fragile" mental states, I felt less alone. Like I wasn't the only one who feels this way, like it wasn't just something wrong with me, it was something that happened to a lot of people. And that in the cases where those characters (think Septimus in Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway") do take their own lives, it was not glorified. It was simply tragic, and pathetic, and nothing was better in the aftermath. Possibly the most disturbed character in literature, in my opinion, is Mersault from Albert Camus's "The Stranger," which is coincidentally one of my favorite books. Mersault's complete numbness and apathy for others and life in general is in stark contrast to the world around him; if anything, it highlighted for me the complete deviance of his way of thinking and how different I was from him. I felt things, I loved things, life was worth living. I actually read that book, at times, as comfort; I did the same with "Mrs. Dalloway."
But I never forgot that exchange with my mom, and I've struggled with that thought ever since.
There have always been calls to ban books for encouraging or "glorifying" this vice or that maligned way of thinking, but I can never in good conscious support banning a book. The very thought of it is sinister to me, and gives me that icky, sliding feeling in my stomach. Even books that do offend my value system...I just cannot justify it. Censorship has never led to anything good in the history of the world thus far. It does and always will have a nefarious association to me.
But then you see the news. You see kids killing themselves in numbers I really don't think you saw before, even 10-15 years ago when I was in school. And you see kids killing other kids, too. So often that we barely blink when there's a school shooting.
And amidst these tragedies, you hear those voices. It's the video games, it's the movies, it's the books, it's the rap music, etc.
At first it sounds ridiculous. All of those things existed 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, as far back as when my father was in high school, and these things weren't happening. A teen killing his or herself in 1983 when my dad graduated was a monumentous shock; by the time I graduated in 2006, I had known three people who killed themselves and would come to know three more before I graduated college.
My fiancee argues that media hasn't changed, it's people that have. That parents don't emphasize the difference between real and fantasy: they just shove an iPad at their kid and let it do the teaching from the time they're toddlers. I agree, to an extent, that contributes. Few things give me the heebie jeebies more than a kid under 2 who can work an iPad and I see it all the time. We've also gone back and forth discussing secularism's role in desensitizing people to the consequences of suicide (time was in the Catholic church, it was the only sin that could not be forgiven; in Islam, despite the pronouncements of various extremist groups, it is also one of the most wretched sins one can commit). I also agree that has a role, as well, I'm sure.
However, he doesn't believe the argument regarding what's in the media. Again, he points out that during the 1990s when he was coming of age, he listened to some rather grimy rappers (Nas, pre-"Empire State of Mind" Jay-Z, Biggie, Tupac, NWA, Wu-Tang Clan, etc) who encouraged violence against police and women, drug use, and casual sex. He played video games with guns and watched movies like "The Terminator." Valid points, as none of these encouraged him to turn around and renact these behaviors in real life. For the most part, I also agree with this. Like I said, if anything, the books I read regarding characters suffering from depression or committing suicide never glorified it for me, they gave me the strength to perservere.
But recently, my feelings on this particular argument are starting to shift. And I don't know how to feel about it.
It started with "The Fault in Our Stars." Before you pounce: yes, I read the book. Yes, I have great respect for John Green. But no, I didn't think it was that good. And I felt...unsettled by the topic, considering it is actually a "young adult" book geared for, shall we agree, people from the age of 11-16 or thereabouts. I get it; young adult literature has gotten more brazen, less young and more adult in the past years (think "Gossip Girl"). It's not "The Giver" and "The Babysitters Club," or even "Harry Potter" anymore. Which is a whole other problem regarding the over-sexualization of children you see now that you didn't back then--but that's another post. This post is about death.
And I didn't like how it was portrayed in "The Fault in Our Stars." I just didn't. Yes, it was sad. People cried their eyes out. But it was also romantic as hell, up to and even after the climactic events. It tied back to earthly existence, which is exactly what death is not. Death is unbound by earthly existence, earthly desires (the dunya, in Islam). To tie it to these things is to make it common, tangible, less sacred.
But, believe it or not, at the time I didn't think much of it. Whatever, I'm entitled not to like a book. Maybe it was just my reaction to everyone else positively losing their minds about it. I brushed it aside after a few days and pretty much forgot those feelings as it moved to the bottom of my eBooks library.
Then, a month ago, my mother was visiting, and we were all watching television when a trailer came on for a movie called "If I stay."
I'll tell you, when the trailer was over, I flipped out a little. I think I said to my mom something to the effect, "This is why kids think death is just so cool."
I will preface this by saying I have not seen this movie, I do not know the exact plot. But that almost fuels my argument. Because in the < 3 minutes of the trailer, what I saw was a complete glorification of death, again, featuring a teenage cast. And I didn't even have to pay $12 to do it.
This is the trailer.
Feel free to tell me "You don't get the whole story," "That's not the point," etc. Good, I hope that's the case. I hope I'm wrong. But that doesn't change the fact that that is what this movie is using to draw it's mostly teenage audience in with. And amongst that audience is going to be kids who are more fragile, lonely, isolated for all the reasons I mentioned above and more. Who are going to see this and think, This will give my life more meaning.
You might think I'm oversimplifying the teenage mind. And I am, to a degree. Few teenagers will literally think "Yes, I need to get into a terrible car accident so Bobby will love me," though some will and that's disturbing. But I do think it, if nothing else, softens and romanticizes death, or "near" death. This, paired with "The Fault in Our Stars," really turned my stomach.
Maybe I'm overreacting. But I don't think, if I had a 11-16 year old daughter, I would want her watching this movie, or any other that deals with teenagers and death in this way, without having a serious conversation. Hopefully she'd already be equipped with the ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy, and recognize that movies imitate real life but are not in fact real life. But with that line getting blurrier and blurrier as time goes on, will I have that guarantee?
And then I feel like a close-minded, controlling, untrusting censor, which some people would argue is the role of the parent, but is something I don't have a whole lot of reference for because my parents were never much in the way of censors. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I watched "Seinfeld" as a kid. I was reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King in the fourth grade. I watched "The Wall" with my dad for the first time when I was 7, and knew all the words to "Comfortably Numb" and "Hotel California" by the time I was 9. I saw "Cruel Intentions" at 11, listened to Eminem at 12, and read "A Clockwork Orange" at 14. And a lot of people would argue that my parents should have restricted me more, but I don't think so. For the good and the bad, those shows, books, movies, and music that I was exposed to from an early age made me who I am. They gave me a love for art that comforted me, made me laugh, made me feel less alone in my darkest hours.
But I didn't commit suicide. I didn't kill anyone. If I had, these things would have all been looked on in a very, very different light.
So what do you do. Do you take the chance that everything will be fine, that your kid will be ok, they will know where to draw the line?
I know people much older, much more experienced, who have children of their own still grapple with this. So I don't expect a revelation to come now, or even when I do have kids, inshallah, or even when those kids are teenagers. But it still troubles me in an existential way and a practical way.
Am I getting old, stodgy? Am I getting to the point where being a teenager is foreign to me, and I don't understand that most of them are just fine?
Whenever I think that, I think of the increasing number of suicides, school shootings. I think of some things I see on Facebook and Twitter from teen relatives that make me shake my head, that if nothing ever happens will just be some stupid stuff they said on Twitter when they were 18 (we've all been there) but if something does happen will be see as glaring, underlined, bolded cries for help.
So if that's the case, will I stop my own kids from seeing, reading, or listening to things I would have been allowed to listen to by my own parents? Just in case?
I don't know. I might.
There are some people who will probably look at this as "Another religious person wants to ban creative expression." That's the farthest from the truth. If I do censor what my children read, listen to, or watch, I don't think I will ever feel 100% good about it.
Especially books. As someone who loves books, loves reading, who was comforted by these stories, whose life was changed by the books I read...I will never feel right about stopping my child from reading a book.
I don't want to have to. But the more I see what's being put out there, the more the truth becomes distorted, I am disgusted, and afraid.
So in the meantime, I pray that with time will come wisdom, and when the time comes, I will be able to have conversations with my children so that I can trust they will make the right decisions and that ultimately they will make the right decisions.
I want them to see life for what it is: beautiful, precious, a gift from God. I also want them to see death for what it is, and what it isn't: a sacred, permanent state that is beyond comprehension, not a solution or answer to an earthly problem.
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