You’ve probably seen the video of the little three-year-old girl who was swept up and away – 100 feet into the air – when she became entangled in a gigantic kite that took flight on a gust of wind.
She and her family were attending a kite festival Sunday in Hsinchu City, Taiwan, when a great, long orange streamer whipped by, snapped around her neck and swung her up, back and forth across the sky for a full 30 seconds before dropping her back to earth and into the arms of onlookers. She came away with a few minor scratches … and probably a lifelong fear of heights.
It’s an unbearable moment, especially if you’re a parent – the stuff nightmares, as well as miracles, are made of.
Wonder, though, if it’s any scarier, in the long run, than watching our children swept away from us by the violent gusts of a society that’s lost all sense of its bearings – the wild currents of a culture whipping out of control.
In the movie, Spanglish, an immigrant mother finds herself deeply at odds with her own preteen daughter, who is rejecting, at the top of her lungs, her mother's values and character. At length, through tears, the wounded mother says:
"I never expected to have to ask you, at such a tender age, the most important question of your life. But ... is what you want for yourself to become someone very different than me?"
It's a heartbreaking question being asked by parents in a million homes, in this summer of white-hot furies.
“What do they want?” we wonder, watching these mostly entitled, unbridled young people smash and burn and coldly shoot and viciously beat helpless people around them. These are not impoverished youth. They didn’t grow up with no food on the table and nothing under the Christmas tree. They may not have had both parents – or even one, who knew how to love and discipline and talk to them. But most of these had the cellphones, the laptops, the widescreen TVs.
And yet – they’re not crying out for love and understanding, for deeper fellowship and sweeter compassion. They’re not asking, “What is truth?” They’re breaking into jewelry and appliance stores. They’re trying to burn down buildings with people in them.
They want not more harmony, but less history. Like that little girl, they’re being carried aloft by something that has an insane grip on them … that’s choking them, even as they fly.
I’m remembering a university classroom, in the mid-'80s, and the final exam of a tough class on political science. The culmination of a semester-long immersion in every recorded and imagined form of government: ones based on philosophy, race, gender, power, even anarchy.
Oh – and psychology. A government imagined by one of the world’s most renowned psychologists (he’d want me to mention his name), envisioning a nation in which all of us lived in tightly disciplined camps, directed by ... psychologists, naturally.
Each and all, we would wear identical clothes, eat identical meals, perform the same menial work tasks and exercise to one kind of music. We would all practice the same hobbies and abhor the same religious values. None of us would have any individual possessions or identity, just boundless gratitude to the psych Reich for stripping us of anything that might potentially cause conflict.
Like … freedom.
Imagine how happy John Lennon might have been in a place like that.
At any rate: the final exam over, and with a few last minutes left in the lecture hall, the professor looked up at his 50 surviving students and, like any good political scientist, called for a vote. Of all these myriad forms of government we’d been studying, which would we actually choose to live under, give our dearest druthers?
Out of the 50 young people – at this Christian university, in the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” in the middle of a decade that saw church attendance soaring across America – three of us embraced baseball, motherhood, and apple pie. We cheerfully opted for a democratic republic, of the kind our Founding Fathers had worked so hard to establish.
The other 47 voted for the psychologist’s utopia.
The professor was clearly taken aback by their choice, and asked someone to explain it. A blond, athletic-looking fellow near the back leapt to his feet.
“Because,” he said, “that way I’d know nobody else had any more than I did.”
Hoots, cheers, whistles: a sustained thunder of applause. A bell rang, and the once and future mob streamed past their dazed professor and out to ingrain their culture and their children with what a friend calls "the politics of envy."
What they want – these lost, vicious children swarming our streets – is what, sadly, we have more of than they do. Not TVs or t-shirts, the jewelry or the junk.
What we have more of is ... hope. Faith. Purpose. A heritage. A sense of identity. Of the responsibilities that come with freedom. Of the peace that comes only from God.
They yearn for these things. And yet burn to reject these things.
So, disillusioned but defiant, they would tear these eternal verities away from us, that we might be like them, “driven and tossed by the wind.” Flying. Choking.
Falling.
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