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Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Young People Belong to All of Us

When we sent our children off to college, we expected homesickness, problems with adjusting to new friends, getting to class on time and possibly balancing free time with study time and maybe a few issues with budgeting money. We never expected to be worried about their safety in the way some parents have experienced it lately.

One parent of a student at Northern Illinois University expressed her relief that her daughter was safely home from the college campus where five students were killed on campus before the gunman committed suicide. We would immediately consider this the work of a terrorist, extremist or someone completely unbalanced. The conflicting reports about the young man who killed those innocent students more than puzzles most of us. How could someone who is described as a good student do something so unbelievably awful?

Young adults often experience confusion and crisis as they mature, and if they live away from family and friends those crises can become magnified and overwhelming. Rarely do they result in what appears to be random acts of violence, but this time, they did. Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of these young people whose lives, we learned, were full of promise. We shake our heads and wait for someone to make sense out of these senseless killings. That may never happen.

As families and friends mourn their loved ones, we should be looking at our young people, especially those who seem troubled. Can we reach out to them before they fall over the edge into despair and destructive behavior? Every child belongs to all of us, and we need not only to believe that but act accordingly. No parent can watch and protect a child all days in all ways. We would reach out without thinking to a toddler if that child was in danger. The same should be true of our young adults who believe themselves invincible until they reach our age, and realize every day is a gift that not only needs to be cherished but shared with those around us.

Instead of pulling back from others and locking our children away — which wouldn’t work anyway — we must make our children perceptive and proactive so that if they meet someone who needs help to alert those who know how to respond to someone who is troubled. In no way am I suggesting we make our youth into amateur psychologists who propose a diagnosis, but they need to know who to call if they feel something is wrong. They may never need to call anyone, but more and more often, we need counselors and mental health professionals. Wishing the world were safer and kinder to everyone will not protect anyone from harm.