South City Confessions: This is no country for young people

This week, the Gutting the Sacred Cow podcast released the segment where I made a guest appearance, gutting the sacred “No Country for Old Men.”

An overrated Coen Brothers yarn about an unstoppable force going through just about every object in his path. It had more issues than there’s time for, but as I watched the discussion the movie (“he’s wrong, I hate my life” to “I’ll have to listen to first”) generated, another thought drifted into my head.

This real world is seriously no country for young people. How many young souls have been taken on the streets of St. Louis city alone? Don’t look for the answer. It’s awful. This was a problem before the pandemic, but it’s only raged upward since 2020.

Take a look at this paragraph from a Washington Post article in January:

The sisters in Ohio, both in elementary school, were shot by their father. The boy in Texas was shot at home by someone in a passing car. The ninth-grader in Arkansas was shot at school by a friend. The girl in Kansas was shot by a toddler, who didn’t mean to do it. The teenager in South Carolina shot himself, but he did mean to do it.

CBS News wrote in October that 1,165 teens and children were killed by gun violence last year. Again, this was published with plenty of days left in 2021. What an awful number. A shocking number that represents a terrible loss of potential love-giving and talent.

Both of those things are sacred and only tell a fourth of the story. Love-giving means that a child could have grown up to get married and have children. Pets could have been saved. Birthday parties. Graduations. First homes. Last stop. Vacations. All that world that didn’t get seen or touched. Those lonely roads without the tire marks and gasoline station chip bags blowing down the street. “What if” constantly drifts in and out of the mind.

Talent is self-explanatory. Could that soul have helped another soul, or possibly a 100 more souls? Could she have set the new record for MLB games managed by a female? Did the world just lose a potential groundbreaking talent?

The amount of mystery that we are left with the death of a child could stuff 15,000 tales. Coming from a guy who watched his infant son tiptoe around death, I know what the potential of that feeling is like. It was heavy, I can tell you that.

I can only imagine what it would feel like to lose a child. I would imagine it would feel like your heart is ripped out of your chest and held ransom for the rest of your life; only time could get it back to you in one piece. Every time I drop my son off at school, I pull away but go slow. I did so I could look back at him to see his body pulled around the corner.

A terrible feeling goes through my mind most mornings. I won’t elaborate. You know what it is. You can’t keep these thoughts out of your head. They barge in like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, guns blazing and no vest in sight. I fight it off and pull away.

Losing a child to gun violence is so bad, the movies rarely even do it. When bad things are happening more in real life than the movies, I would say that’s a problem.

As Tom Petty once sang, there’s no easy out. There is no shortcut out of gun violence in young lives. Mental health deserves many, many more hours than the US government is willing to give it. Everybody wants to hush it out or toss medicine at it. That’s the terrain. Do you charge hard at the parents of the other teens killing the kids? Do you drag in the parents of young school shooters? Is there good in that brand of interrogation, or would it just regurgitate a new horror?

I hope someone figures this out, or Captain America shows up. 2022 is already looking like another rise in those bad numbers. The ones that I have to keep hearing about each day and night on the news. Every morning is greeted with more tragedy than good; too much dark and not enough light. Another life that won’t even reach 10.

This isn’t hyperbole; this is real life. What’s happening to our youth is a problem. Who is going to stop it? I have no answers. I’m just sad about it every time the awful floods my brain. This may be no country for old men, but it’s also increasingly looking like one that can’t even hold young souls.

Thanks for reading and goodnight.