YOUNG HEARTS RUN FREE: SELF PRESERVATION IS WHATS REALLY GOING ON TODAY

VERY UNFINISHED

We had arrived in Washington D.C., ten of us from each of the major cities around the country, totaling just over one hundred high school students from the continental united states and Puerto Rico. It was September of 2002 and I had accepted a nomination to participate in the Anti-Defamation League’s National Youth Leadership Mission to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I remember the Secret Service swarming and encircling the area at the first stops, the hotel and Pennsylvania Avenue, at once exciting and alarming. We chatted with each other and stared at our six ancient companions, survivors of the Holocaust, delighting in our new sense of self-importance but fearing the reality—the infamous sniper was still picking people off at gas stations around D.C.

We were to be ambassadors of peace and justice, a serious job description in the relatively recent arrival of the post 9/11 world. I was among my peers, bright-eyed youth who are supposed to feel inspired by global violence and carry the weight of potential world peace on their shoulders. Still growing breasts and managing awkwardly long limbs, it wasn’t too soon for our grandfathers and grandmothers to pass on the burden of their mismanaged history, to capitalize on the anxious energy that only the loss of more than 3000 lives on American soil had produced.

The mission of the 96 hours was to learn about the Holocaust and to apply these lessons to modern-day issues of bigotry and intolerance in America. The programs leaders and Holocaust survivors led us in 18-hour days filled with workshops on the importance of fueling frustrations into a dialogue that emphasizes diversity, action, and open communication.

We were told how vital it is that human beings exist in an orderly world where injustice is addressed, and a sense of security radiates. Life is now less secure, less certain, they said, and we had to understand.

I understood.

The tumultuous summer preceding had dulled my expectations of people and activated a mode of self-preservation that I existed in for several months. My mother and father had located each other as the fourth point on the axis of evil and had decided to share their hatred and disappointment in one another with me and the rest of the world. The sight of both of them grasping for their share or more of a previously combined pool of money, resources, and dignity had made me exhausted, unreceptive, and unwilling to take the chance of relying on anyone else to take care of me. I’d also lost my virginity that July, just a week after my sobbing mother had parked me outside the ice cream store to tell me about my dad filing for divorce. She was so ashamed, she said, so ashamed and so sorry. I didn’t cry when she told me and I didn’t feel anything at all towards Rob the next week. I wondered about my ability to feel compassion.

But I found passion again. I recovered feeling in my body and mind that September in D.C..

It was 36 hours in, and I was kissing Ryon from the Puerto Rico delegation. It was exhilarating—in between the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating conversations of my life, I feeling his lips on mine and my back pressed up against a wall in a white bright stairwell, drunk on the feeling of release from the numbing of my nerves by fear, disappointment, and anxiety.

It wasn’t about him, although he was certainly a tan and beautiful young man. I was bouncing back, destroying my disappointment, my bitterness, my vulnerability with a sense of purpose and some human connection.

Emotionally, intellectually, and physically my 16-year-old nerves, mind, and lips were jolted to a point of bursting. I want to feel this awake my entire life, I thought, I’m going to fight for this feeling.

Eight years later and eight years deeper in the politics of fear, I find myself having to fight harder than ever not to slip back into numbness.

My generation, the generation who remembers vividly snipers and 9/11, Columbine and Katrina, the generation that can look around their classrooms and see so many of their peers on depression, anxiety, focus, or hyperactivity medications, is a generation that understands what it is to be both emotionally full and empty.

( I am not too much older now than I was then but already I feel that ability to live in the moment, to bounce back from fear with hope and energy, dripping from my trembling fingers and swirling down into the numbingly anxious busyness of adult life. We graduate from college, or we get jobs, or we graduate and go back to school, leave the country or move back home, and never escape a world where self-preservation and the regulation of passion, of emotion, is required. ) ?


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