“Pirates”: They Were Teenagers, and The Elders Too Often Asleep

DATELINE: re SOMALIA, AFRICA
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Monday that three Somali pirates who were killed by the Navy’s Seals to end a hostage crisis were “untrained” teenagers.

Addressing an audience at the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Virginia, Gates said that the slain pirates, aged at between 17 to 19, were heavily armed but inexperienced. [The fourth teenager who is still alive is reported to be 16 and is in US custody.]

They were shot dead on Sunday at the end of a five-day standoff with the U.S. military after they attacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship about 400 kilometers away from Somali and held an American captain as hostage. Read the rest here at: Al-Jazeerah

……and on the other side of the world

DATELINE: SASKATCHEWAN, CANADA
from Metronews.ca Vancouver

MEADOW LAKE, Sask. –
Three Saskatchewan teens are being hailed as heroes after rescuing a mother and three young children from a car that slid off a wet Saskatchewan highway into a water-filled ditch.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police say the young men, ages 18 and 19, didn’t hesitate to jump into the icy water Saturday night after they saw the car sinking with four people inside. The woman and all three kids, ages four to eight, were pulled to safety on a darkened secondary highway near Meadow Lake, Sask.

Police say the water was up to the car roof when they arrived on the scene and the young family escaped with only minor injuries.

On other days, other nights, these two stories could be reversed. Good/ horrible stories occur on every side of the world. And it is so, even as we speak. Yet many elders look only to the ‘good’ teens, and try to ignore and overlook the agonies of teens are unheld, given no real blessing, bad hurting, or fleeing to some self-styled refuge of indefensible values and ill-fantasies somewhere in their minds.

Poor and more well-off teens–all the sadder, the so completely sadder– for their having lived such small lives like an artery narrowed so early by the plaque of too much twisted mind or malice… the young of many different kinds can be not only under-blessed and overlooked by their elders, but also misled by twisted elders, or can be seeking the manly rite of passage in a culture half-destroyed of all the young’s moments to shine… except for going to war and cotillions… or becoming a terrorist. Or they can be ill, sick unto death ill of mind and spirit. And sometimes, most all of the above.

Next week is the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, a time that, having worked there as a post-trauma specialist for a long time after– I marvel that it has been ten years. At last. There is often another release of trauma at a late anniversary point. We dont know why. It just is. The psyche seems to have a clock in it, that at one and three and five and seven and ten years, goes off, and another cell door swings open, releasing the spirit just that much more.

Yet, this past week, a set of murders at an immigration center in New York a decade later, recaptilated Columbine with eerily same number of dead and same number of those maimed, people hiding in classrooms and broom closets, police not coming in for what seemed hours after via following their protocol, in both cases.

It isnt exactly that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were teenagers, or the Somalian terrorists were teenagers, or Charles Mansion’s murderous crowd, or Cho at Virginia Tech, or Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend Carol Fugate who as teens in 1957 murdered 11 innocent people ‘for no reason…’ although to think of how very young and what the heck do you know of the choices of the wide world when you are a teenager, even a 25 year old, even 35 or older yet?

Accurate information, real possibilties, a larger world view, perspective and wisdom tend to come clearest ten or more years after the event in which we so desperately needed them.

To think of such early decimation of the futures of the young is nearly enough to make one think of going screaming down the spirit road with one’s angel afire… over that loss of promising lives that turned twisted instead.

I’ve noticed in my work over the years, that there’s what I’d call a triumvirate of tolerance, ignorance and indecision which can create a powerful sleeping potion for elders and others, one that prevents us, not from seeing, but from acting on what we know to be so, surely from the hundreds of massacres seen in one’s lifetime thus far alone… that the young can not only be misled, mis-fashioned, written on in malignant ways, but can also, pushed by an illness, turn toward enacting mortal harm on others.

Despite some non-observant ‘neighbors’ who claim of persons who have become serial killers, ‘he was quiet and always nice,’ ... the murderous persons carrying unanchored souls and who are deeply and homicidally ill in spirit and in mind… we sense there is something wrong from far earlier. We know this. We do. And we often forbear.

Even when it’s teenagers. Perhaps because it is teenagers.

And here in the US, we seem dangerously unclear about the difference between a homicidal /suicidal disorder in a young person… and a teen going through a stage, trying to find themselves, toying with the thrill of death, but carrying a heart that is not twisted, carrying a conscience that has not gone blank.

They are two different things. Far two different matters.

It would be so good if we could all learn to better and justly differentiate between these clearly. Especially for the innocents who are harmed by our not knowing, not noticing, and… not acting to intervene in effective ways, to help, to contain.

As though ‘the sleeping potion’ has gotten into the food supply worldwide… this lapse of discernment and action is as common here, as it is in the elders of the tribes in Somalia.