Lily’s New Strange World Today

 Many of today’s teens are terribly troubled. But so were many teens when I was growing up back in the age of dinosaurs.

 This is a response to an article by Diane Dimond on Huffington Post about issues experienced by today’s troubled youth. She cites such examples as the cluster of youth who committed suicide in Palo Alto, CA by running in front of a train, and the Richmond High School rape.

Everything you say is valid. And yet there is nothing new under the sun. I can remember as a twelve year old entering junior high in 1977, a high school aged couple committed suicide by driving their car into a wall at 75 MPH. By the time I was in eighth grade, we were doing “head rushes” on each other, which involved pressing your hands to the sides of a partner’s neck to cut off circulation and briefly cause them to lose consciousness. Many of us started cutting. I was pretty “prude” when it came to acting out sexually but a lot of people I knew had multiple partners at junior high age. A few girls I knew bragged about getting together with a 25 year old local man–and it was true. Many of us were doing drugs. By the end of high school, one of my friends had hanged himself. These are not new problems–they are problems that have never been addressed. And things will never get better until they are addressed.

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