Lost Boys

When I was pregnant I remember hoping that I wouldn’t have a girl. I was relieved and happy when my son was born. This wasn’t out of any misguided cultural notions that a boy would care for me in my old age, or that the burden of the sizable dowry that a daughter would have to married off with would be too much. It wasn’t even the perhaps slightly less idiotic fear of raising a girl in a misogynist, patriarchal society that would value her for her sex and beauty more than for her strength, athleticism, kindness or smarts.

No, I shuddered instead at what I went through when I was growing up, and I felt too feeble and weak to deal with the vagaries of shepherding a girl through minefields of schoolyard bullies, predatory men, drugs and alcohol, and adolescent hormonal freakouts. 

Now, in the face of what has become a regular news barrage filled with sad, hate-filled young men, twisted beyond recognition into models of rage and violence, I think back and wonder how I was so far off the target. Why I assumed those issues to be uniquely female problems I can only ascribe to my own sex and gender stew.

I feel sadness and regret at the waste and loss of life. At the victims, the list of whose names gets longer and longer as the bodies pile up. At the young men who are so emotionally stunted, so tragically tweaked, that the only ‘manly’ way they see to deal with the emotional wreckage of their lives is to take out as many people as they can when they kill themselves. I do believe that the staging of a public killing spree is as much “death by cop” as running at a line of armed police officers can be.

As I watched the video footage of the horrible, sadistic bombing of the crowd in Boston, I couldn’t help thinking that we were about to find yet another twisted teenage boy or young man at the end of the hunt. Turns out, there were two lost souls behind the rampage this time. But the unfolding tale appears to be the same as what we are beginning to recognize as the blueprint for such tragic circumstances to occur: one or more boys who clearly got the message that in a male, weakness is bad, and that the notoriety of killing as many people as you can before dying in a hail of bullets is better than asking for help.

I sincerely hope that we begin to talk about and address the outmoded and ridiculous codes of behavior we demand that men adhere to, and start to turn the tide of hurt that drives young people to commit similar acts of desperation. My hope is for America, for the world, but most of all for my son.