Calling All Elders
When I was in my late 20s I drove by Utah Valley University every day of my life. I was a truck driver at the time and would often look eastward towards campus from I-15 and fantasize about going back to school. Sitting beneath the stunning Timpanogos Wilderness, Orem is undoubtedly one of the more beautiful cities in the country, and knowing the people of Utah, I often idealized how safe and welcoming the campus environment would be.
Yesterday conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight on the lawn of that very same campus in Orem. Hours later a school shooter opened fire on his classmates and took his own life in the small mountain town of Evergreen, just 10 miles west of my current home in Lakewood, CO.
Should you drive 30 miles northeast of Evergreen you’ll run into the King Soopers where a 21-year-old gunman killed 10 in 2021. Take 36 into Aurora and you’ll run into the movie theater where in 2012 another gunman killed 12 and wounded over 80 on opening night of The Dark Knight Rises. Arriving back in Lakewood you wouldn’t have to travel far to find another site of mass terror, as I did this past spring when I decided to walk my dog at a nearby lake and accidentally stumbled on the Columbine Memorial, dedicated to the 13 students and one teacher who lost their lives in what is still the deadliest school shooting in Colorado history.
Part of the reason I mention the above is to exemplify just how widespread and simultaneously close to home these sorts of moral atrocities have become. Though we hold Colorado and other mountain west states in high regard for their wilderness, national parks, wildlife and beautiful open space, the reality of mental health in this part of the country is that all 10 of the states ranking highest in suicide lie west of the Mississippi with eight of those residing either in or west of the Rockies.
The other reason I regrettably highlight these tragedies is to discuss what I feel is by far the most important comorbid factor in all of these cases: intergenerational letdown.
At this point school and public shootings have been committed by people of all grade levels ranging from preschool to university, all major religions, sexes, genders, races and virtually any other identity marker you can think of — the same goes for the victims of these shootings. Naturally in the aftermath of such horrors we instinctively reach to diagnose, pathologize, blame and scapegoat, and yet in our desperate attempt to pluck at the lowest hanging fruit I’m often stunned at our inability to see what’s right in front of our very eyes.
The low-hanging fruit in this dialogue is the soundbites you’ll often hear on repeat from mainstream media: guns, race, politics, good vs. evil, radicalization and so on. While certainly important factors in the conversation I’ve yet to hear any longform discussion about the repeated transgenerational failure of the adults in our country to leave our children with a world markedly better than what we inherited.
To say this is to by no means cast blame on one particular generation, but rather to point out a deeply imbedded and inherited way of life that’s been a mainstay of our culture for decades. When we hear statistics about how Generation Z —born roughly between 1997 and 2012 — spends an average of six hours a day on their phones, how one in five have seriously considered suicide in their lifetimes, or how two of three report struggling with mental health symptoms, we tend to then see these features as characteristics innate to who they are rather than burdens bestowed on them by generations prior.
Increasingly mainstream terms like the “Grandmother Effect” and “Seventh Generation Principle” harken back to more traditional customs humans have employed in helping to ensure the health and wellbeing of future generations for millennia, the former describing sociological and psychological benefits elders impart in the rearing of grandchildren and the latter an indigenous Iroquois belief system that required tribespeople to behave and manage their environment so that those seven generations into the future would benefit from that same bountiful habitat.
What is perhaps so startling about the direction of our culture is the way in which each generation increasingly inherits the debts, poor decisions and nearsighted belief systems of the one prior and must then decide how to manage that unrequested baggage all before their brains are even close to being fully developed. Our children are not waging cultural, mental or even physical wars they created, but rather attempting to manage ones they’ve been handed by the unconscious actions of their ancestors. When undertaken on a more longterm basis this sort of unresolved inheritance begins to accumulate and compound, resulting in more and more weight each generation must carry and therefore less resources they possess themselves in order to carve out a sustainable future down the road. The bill for this sort of mentality has most obviously come due in the form of our national debt, chronic health issues, homeownership crisis, technology addictions and currently most glaring as of this past week: our endless, divisive and quite literally lethal political rhetoric.
To illustrate the importance of intergenerational communication and lineages look no further than the animal kingdom. A common error we make in our casual observance of nature is to assume infant species are born equipped with the ability to survive and navigate the world at birth, and while this is certainly the case for many reptiles, it is far less so for mammals. Basic tasks like locating trail systems, eating, hunting, communicating and even regulating emotional responses are often learned behaviors passed down from parent to offspring over the course of millions of years. Remove this ancient parentage, as happens when animals enter into zoos or other domestic environments, and their behaviors begin to change quite rapidly in successive generations. Born entirely dependent on their caregivers with brains that don’t fully develop until the mid 30s, humans are complete outliers in the game of transgenerational learning, spending the entire first half of life absorbing new information, new roles and new ways of interpreting the world before becoming true adults who can then pass that very same wisdom onto their offspring.
It is in taking all this into consideration that the murder of Charlie Kirk is so symbolic in our current zeitgeist. Starting in his own adolescent years Charlie was someone who spent his entire life engaged with the youth of our country in an attempt to push the values and beliefs of future generations in a direction he felt was most promising for longterm flourishing. He traveled around to college campuses, set up tents and challenged young minds to debates on some of the more hot-button topics in society that have been brewing for decades. He was no doubt a polarizing figure and like all polarizing figures he became the product of systemwide projective identification. If you were on the right he was a savior, and if on the left an increasingly existential threat. It is a sad reflection on the state of our society that there was not enough room for Charlie to exist as a mother’s son, passionate father and avuncular provocateur who could at times be overly direct with language in an attempt to express highly complex and imperfect political opinions.
Though it may be difficult for some to draw a connection between Charlie and the cohort of liberal-minded revolutionaries martyred in the 1960s, it is quite clear to me that underneath the surface of these tragic deaths there is a throughline of what happens when elders go AWOL in their responsibilities to future generations and become complacent in their own critical thinking and rigid belief systems they inherited. In the 60s it was sending our youth to die in a war halfway around the world for a cause even the adults didn’t believe in, forcefeeding them outdated racial and sexual stereotypes and stonewalling youngsters for exercising the right to do what they chose with their minds and bodies.
Today it’s… well, I’ll leave that up for you to decide. While we’re certainly still in the midst of a sociopolitical maelstrom, one thing is increasingly clear from my standpoint: We need more adults, grandmas, mentors and elders willing to think seven generations ahead, not only for the safety and health of our children, but for the sustainability of all life on Earth.
