Hipstory

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One Year and a Few Days Later

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It’s been just over a year since he died. And while media pundits on both side of the aisle continue to debate the influence of the man, his death, and his legacy, I can tell you that children have turned it all into a meme. Because…of course they have.

Teen boys pass his name to each other like currency. They whisper it in the halls, in the classroom, to each other. They listen to songs about his death. They post his picture as the profile of their google classroom.

Girls do not do this. Girls are not immersed in the manosphere. In fact, the only time I’ve heard girls utter his name is when they’ve been in an argument with a boy about his legacy. This is not to say girls are not being influenced. It’s just simply a topic they rarely engage in.

However, girls and boys all saw the murder live on their phone. They saw it replayed time and time again as the algorithm pushed it to them. They watched pundits and news reporters and influencers scream into their screens. Children saw the blood. They saw the death, the gore, the carnage.

News is not like it used to be. When the terrorist attacks unfolded on September 11, we all sat with each other watching TV as the towers tumbled down. We hugged our friends, called our families. We cried, but we cried together.

News has become more isolated. It’s pushed onto individual phones and watched alone. Especially amongst children. Imagine for a moment being 14 and processing the terror attacks on your own. That is what children are doing every day. But where we saw tumbling towers, they see brains and blood.

The days after the murder were bad at school. Tempers were hot. Fights broke out. And, because kids are kids, no one quite understood the reason they were angry. No one could coherently describe their hatred. They simple felt and reacted.

Though, I suppose that was the same for adults as well.

Right wing influencers say that teachers are indoctrinating our children. That’s a lie. Everyday teachers deal with the aftermath of disasters streamed live for your viewing displeasure. How can a teacher do their job when 75% of their classroom watched a man get shot over and over and over again? It’s ridiculous to think that we have the time to have rational conversations about the legacy — good or bad — of the man. Because we are simply trying to deal with the trauma of a child who just watched a human die on their phone.

Teachers are not indoctrinating children. Social media is. And, if for one second you think “No, not my kid…” I’m here to tell you… yes… probably your kid. Even if your kid doesn’t have a phone, their friends do. They see it. They see it. They see it.

Teachers are not indoctrinating children. But you’re all too poloarized to hear us as we scream into a void. The children are not ok.

The. Children. Are. Not. Ok.

2 responses

  1. hotels Avatar
    hotels

    I haven’t really fully parsed the cultural ramifications of all of this (and i’m not a teacher so can’t relate to what it’s like to handle 30 kids at once while trying to educate them at the same time), but as the parent of a 7th grader who loves to regale me with the edgiest memes and AI music he can find, i think the kids are alright. The Kirkiversary passed in our house with a lot of lame music, some launchpads for discussing who and what the guy represented, and some discussion of boundaries about what is and isn’t ok to talk about at school. You’re right that the amount of reactionary stuff most kids are exposed to is unprecedented — but as someone who had unrestricted access to the internet from the age of ~9 and happily watched grainy cartel videos way before Cinemark would let me into an R-rated movie, i really don’t think violence and gore is as corrosive as you think (or as it should be, perhaps).

    17th century New England had community pillories, witch burnings and public executions (maybe a comeback tour on that last one). Kids would be removed from their parents if they weren’t raised to the absurd and invasive community standards of the time. 18th century saw industrial slavery, tarring and feathering of political opponents, and armed uprisings. 19th century had the civil war, the klan, jim crow. 20th century had brutal labor crackdowns, multiple presidential assassinations, national guard troops shooting college kids, so much mob violence it spawned an entire movie genre, and more politically-targeted bombings than i can recite in a single day. The kids saw all of this, too.

    Yes, today the kids get exposed to it in real-time with reaction gifs and musical overlays… but is that actually much different than what we had before? And is the new problem actually violence itself, or the more abstract problem of social media distracting everyone from the immediate goals of the day? Nobody was doing much educating in the days immediately following 9/11 either (and i still remember all the crude and edgy tshirts that i wore in the aftermath; the primary medium for memes before smartphones. there was a whole cottage industry of this stuff).

    Seems like one of the biggest problems is teachers being prevented from helping kids contextualize newsworthy events like this, shackled by parental outrage and the need to immediately forge ahead, adhering to lesson plans and testing mandates, having to pretend as if the outside world doesn’t exist. But that’s not very new, either. Maybe what education needs in the future is the equivalent of a deprivation tank — a return to boarding schools, where the entire information environment is controlled. Maybe that’s why homeschooling has been having a moment, too. I don’t know. If i did i wouldn’t have “We are Charlie Kirk” stuck in my head yet again.

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    1. mshipstory Avatar
      mshipstory

      I hear you, however as I’ve stated before on this blog, the difference between all the time periods you’re discussing is community. Public executions were a family affair. Watching Kennedy’s assassination was done as a family around a TV. This type of violence — an algorithmic force built around the data usage of one person who happens to be 13-17, is unprecedented. This force has resulted in a massive shift of classroom behavior. In the past 3 years children have gone from being able to complete a writing task in the given amount of time, to not being able to write. This is not hyperbole. They can not write things. Not just string sentences, they don’t know how to hold a pencil. They’ve gone from normal teen angst to the type of antics they see influencers do in an effort to get clicks. It’s about “rage baiting” or “destroying” things and people for clout. It’s demonstrable and quantifiable when you’re in the classroom. Additionally, I would argue that the kids were not ok in the times you listed. Slavery was a horrific time period in which children were ripped away from their family. Public executions were a way to ensure obedience to the king/country/government. It’s well documented that war is hell, and that the generations who come back from war were “not ok” (see 1000 yard stare). So, I maintain my stance: algorithmic live streaming of death at the tips of fingers is a detriment to society. Are kids resilient? 100%. Am I, who work with 156 13 and 14 year olds every day, seeing real time repercussions of the social media generations? Also, 100%. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They can exist in real time, just like a child who watched her mother be hanged for being a witch can have complex trauma as a result (Dorothy Good is a decent example). Just because society exists and persists doesn’t mean we can’t do better.

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