irish.lemon

the school shooting generation has grown up. those of us who were in junior high and high school during the days of columbine are now in college. the copycat incidents piled up after columbine and have continued since virginia tech and more recently, niu. personally, as a member of this delusional, co-dependent generation, i’m ashamed to admit i call these people my peers. it’s all been hitting closer and closer to home since virginia tech. first niu where i frantically attempted to call an ex-boyfriend who’s been one of my best friends for over ten years, and failing because the cell towers were overloaded the day of the shooting. next came iadt’s bomb scare where my best friend is a student…a fashion student…people who generally can’t figure out how to properly insert a upass into the turnstile, let alone build a bomb. and it’s finally come home to me. yesterday, there was a fake bomb threat on the lewis center at depaul where i am a student, at a building i frequent for classes.

my overall point being, my generation possess limited to no coping skills without the assistance of prescription drugs. i know it seems a bit out there to state a claim based upon anti-depressants or attention/mood-altering drugs, but think about it for a moment…the generation to have ritalin and adderall shoved down our throats because our parents were too busy or unwilling to deal with them are now without mommy’s cheerful reminder to take your pill(s). most of us are in college and find it more profitable to sell our adderall to fellow students who’d like a high or just don’t feel like taking the pills anymore given that we’ve grown out of the drug-induced social coma and are now encouraged to interact and be extroverted whereas before, over or hyperactivity were seen as the demons. what happens when we all graduate college and a slew of business massacres are committed because we can’t cope with everyday life, a family, and a career?

thankfully, i had parents that nurtured my imaginative and intellectual growth by giving me the option to question…everything. i, unlike these “kids”, didn’t go through adolescence or my teens in a haze of confined, false reality. i am an atheist yes, but i was given the option at a point to decide if i wanted to go to mass anymore or if i even believed in god at all even though it was met with disapproval and abandonment by my own family. i was given the opportunity to read any book i wanted and formulate my own opinion of the world i lived in. these kids suddenly snapped out of the daze they were in for so many years and realized nothing is how they thought mom and dad said it was going to be.

so parents, my advice to you is this: stop coddling and drugging your children and allow them to think for themselves to promote a healthy intellectual development. stop contributing to the interference of MY personal freedoms and educational growth that my parents refused to deprive me of because you couldn’t stand little jimmy and jane banging on pots and pans, playing tag or house in the backyard, or tried to make friends in school. because your “perfect” children are murdering or maiming MY friends and interfering with my life since they’ve been cast out of yours.