The Backward Glance

As some of you know from previous posts, I am attracted to the early 20th century Hebraic philosopher, Martin Buber.  In one piece titled “My Mother,” which is taken from a collection of autobiographical fragments later titled Meetings, Buber uses the backward glance as a way to describe late-life reflections about the childhood trauma of having been abandoned by his mother.  

This backward glance is not a recollection of temporal continuity, but a survey of collective impressions tempered by years of experience and meaning-making.

Abandonment inflicts tremendous wounds on children. Buber spent the entirety of his career trying to understand the ramifications of such abandonment, as well as the interpersonal mis-meetings that result from the initial experiences of loss.  And many children continue to struggle with issues of abandonment whether through death, separation, divorce, displacement or by being immersed in dysfunctional environments.  

As those children become adolescents who then become adults, some guided form of a backward glance is often required to make sense—to repair their woundedness.

As we move further away from this COVID epoch, a version of the backward glance will be required to begin making sense of what we have been through, and what our children have lost.  We will need help reflecting on how this epoch has impacted us but, specifically, how this epoch has impacted our children and, in my case, our students.

After nearly 15 months of mask-wearing, our youngest son and his contemporaries graduated from high school.  For his graduation party, I put together a collage of pictures, my own backward glance of his life.  I stumbled upon a photograph, the origins of which I am unclear.  It is a picture, presumably taken by my son or one of his friends, of about eight or nine cars, parked and gathered in a circle.  The cars are separated by about ten feet, trunk lids open and facing the other cars, with an adolescent boy sitting in each trunk, looking into the circle.  

Some of you may recall that, during a period of summer 2020, children, whose brains require social stimulation as much as my underactive thyroid requires Synthroid, sometimes gathered together, socially distanced; separated but together, they were.  Ostensibly, they were gathering just to hang out, but I believe it was something more than that.  

They were gathering to begin their own version of a backward glance; a making sense of the calamity that was robbing them of precious childhood experiences.  And think about what they endured:  the whole country was shut down and told to stay in the house.  

Parents lost jobs.  Grandparents died.  Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues were closed.  Classes were canceled, prom was canceled, graduations were canceled, baseball games, track meets, choir concerts, band concerts, open houses, football games, volleyball games, and basketball games, funerals, weddings, and baptisms—all canceled.  Visits to colleges were canceled.  Visits to nursing homes were canceled.  Vacations were canceled.  Summer jobs were canceled.  

Uncivil unrest, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, became normalized.  Businesses were burnt to the ground.  Innocent citizens were murdered.  A Presidential candidate called the President a clown, and the President retorted by calling that candidate a habitual liar.  And, as the summer rolled on, statues of our Founders and leaders, all of them flawed in the way that every human being is flawed in every generation and in some fashion, were graffitied and torn down, including Frederick Douglas, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.

All of this, and more, is why, from Day 1, I have been arguing that the real epidemic for the generation of which I am speaking is only now coming to the surface.  These surviving children are often deeply wounded and have been wounded by the selfishness and ineptitude of an elite political class that found creative ways to circumvent the isolation endured by the rest of us, particularly our children.  

At no other time in my 25-years at the University of Dubuque have I witnessed more brain health trauma than I have experienced over the last twelve months. ¹ Anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, and suicides are epidemics on high school and college campuses.  Schizophrenia, catatonic breaks, emotional seizures, and outbreaks in the classroom are regular occurrences.  

These cries for help are from a generation that no longer can find the words to describe what they have experienced, what they are enduring and the toxic environment in which they have been formed.  We have not given them much for which to hope or visualize a better future.

So I have a request.

Quit listening to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Fox News, and start listening to your children and grandchildren.  Turn off and tune out the noise that revels in the present ongoing dysfunctionality of our society, and tune in to those moments of community and sense-making, like the boys gathered together in a midsummer circle of cars, to listen—really listen—to what your children and grandchildren are saying—or leaving left unsaid. 

Policymakers:  please invest in comprehensive brain health solutions beginning in middle school.  Invest the resources to functionally resource counselors and therapists to intervene and to help.  And add a layer of accountability, so that we know that our resources are being efficiently and effectively deployed.

Parents, guardians, aunts, uncles, and Grandparents, with the children you love, you can:

• Take a walk
• Go fishing  
• Go to church  
• Make breakfast
• Read a book
• Visit a museum
• Go to a ballgame
• Take a family picnic 
• Make dinner together
• Enjoy a family movie night
• Pray together

Replace their fear and anxiety with the two priceless gifts and interventions that matter to them more than anything else:  your love and your presence.

And then let the healing begin.