In recent years, two Palo Alto High School students committed suicide on the CalTrain tracks. Steven Wertheimer died in 2002 and Ben Tachibana died in 2003.
Palo Alto On-line News May 5, 2009 re: Gunn High School
Last night as CBS Evening News with Katie Couric showed its video of the Superintendent of Schools speaking before parents about the fourth suicide at Gunn High School of a teen-ager jumping in front of a train, I noticed a tiny detail about his appearance which is revelatory about our anonymous society: the Superintendent had a photo-ID around his neck, as if he needed to let authorities "somewhere" know that he was legitimate, i.e. not a menacing presence.
Don't think for a second, that a world in which teenagers are surrounded by adults every day who need to wear photo-ID's around their neck isn't sending kids a very subtle and devastating message: You are not safe; you live in the post-Columbine era.
Remember the time when you were young and had "bad" dreams and your parents comforted you with words like "you're safe, nothing's going to happen to you as long as we're here".
Now adults wear name tags which ironically are designed to create a safe, identifiable adult staff in a school system, but send exactly the OPPOSITE message: You are NOT safe therefore adults must wear a name tag and photo that matches his/her face.
Add to that anxiety, the anxiety of being judged annually if not semi annually, and in some cases quarterly, by computer generated tests and told that you "fit" or "don't fit" on this level of an achievement scale and one can feel the increased anxiety and sense of futiltiy in the already difficult process of childhood evolution escalating exponentially.
And now, parents can check their students' grades in each course daily on-line. One doesn't even have to ask, "Did you do your homework?" One merely accuses: "Your gradesheet says you aren't doing your homework".
And if you live in an America 2009 riddled with Willy Loman's disease, the "Anonymity of Modern Man" (Death of a Saleman, 1949, Arthur Miller), there is very little hope for you to get the same kind of attention from adults and friends which they give to televison, computers, cellphones and iPods.
I am nobody---even if I am on the Honor Roll---these kids are telling us.
And we are good adults: We are listening attentively with our earphones turned down low so we can hear---but we are not listening with our with our hearts.
We're busy.
We have turned their world into a technological circle of emptiness in Dante's Digitalized Inferno.
We're here ------- but we do not hear.
