A little love for the counselor

I'm trying to be more flexible, and I think I may have found something about which to change my mind. Those of you who know my mind (and I do thank you!) know that I tend to hold to the beliefs and values that have seen me through almost three score years. For instance, in the late 1960's I developed an attachment to the band Love (http://love.torbenskott.dk/) that refuses to waver, even in the face of the disdain that greets me when I speak of the band with the fervor of a young convert or door-to-door soulsaver. I travel down any "Road" that the novels of Kerouac can take me, I "Howl" at the poetry of Ginsberg, and whenever I see a fire engine racing to an incident, I'm as likely as not to try to go see where the call takes them. These vestiges of the 60's are with me for good.

I was, like the rest of the nation, awakened to horrible news early on New Year's Eve. A family from right around the corner - a neighborhood that I cut through to get to work - was coming back from a family holiday in Michigan when some drunk-driving fool, driving in the wrong direction down an interstate in Ohio, smashed into them, killing the mother and four of the kids. Two other kids and their father survived somehow.

You might be surprised to hear that back in the day, the "town drunk" was an amusing comic figure, lampooned in many TV shows and movies. About the most that most police agencies would do to a drunk driver then was to take him or her home, leaving their car by the side of the road to be retrieved later. Very rarely was anyone charged, prosecuted or jailed. It was the kind of thing that people whispered about, shaking their heads as the lovable lush veered from pillar to post on the way to get more hooch. News coverage was much less broad in those days too, so maybe there would have been more a serious tone taken with drunk driving had people been able to see photos like this in the paper, or online, or on TV:


You see, that's what the carnage looks like when a drunken butthead races at breakneck speed in the wrong direction on an interstate and runs head-on into a van full of people from my neighborhood who were only trying to come home from a fun family Christmas. Notice the gifts and the kids' clothing all over the highway. This is where the lives of five people came to a sudden and violent end, because this man was driving while his blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.

But, here is where I am changing my thoughts.

When I was in third grade, our school librarian lived in our neighborhood, and then one day, despondent over her marital troubles, she drove to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and jumped off, ending her life. Our teacher, a woman from Southern Maryland's farm country who, shall we say, lacked big-city sophistication and sensitivity, told us, "The library is closed for a while. Mrs. ______ 's husband left her, so she went to the Bay Bridge and killed herself. Bring in books from home if you want to read them."

When I was in tenth grade, a fellow sophomore was run over by his school bus one morning. Midway through the morning, the principal got on the intercom to state, "There have been a lot of rumors about someone dying this morning. Well, it's true, and his name was Ricky ______, a sophomore. Please remember to be careful at your bus stops when the bus is backing up. That is all."

Then, in my eleventh grade, a senior was killed on his way to school when his motorcycle skidded on a wet road and he was struck by a car. This time, the principal delivered more of a heartfelt threnody, and spoke with some sadness over the p.a. system about the loss of a fellow student. But, the teacher in whose classroom I was standing while the announcement was made to a stunned student body had this to say: "Bob was not a great student in Senior English, but he didn't deserve to have this happen to him."

Gee, ya think?

Having been educated in what must seem like a draconian era, I was a bit skeptical when, in the past few years, I saw that schools routinely furnished counselors and psychologists to help students cope with such enormities. Using the cloudy logic that has marred many a thought, I used to think, "WE didn't need to have people come in and help us face it when WE had a sad loss back in OUR day."

And then it came to me that maybe we should have! At least, it would have been better if we had gotten some counseling in third grade, tenth grade, eleventh, whenever. Maybe a bit of committed, understanding counseling would have made my generation, numbered among which are certainly the parents of this Ohio felon, more kind, more thoughtful, more centered. My generation was going to put an end to war, and yet they voted for Cheneybush like lemmings. By the millions, we gulp antacids like crazy, seek to numb our neuroses with Prozac, mess with drugs, booze, and inappropriate couplings, and weep and wail for the departed, when, if a skilled counselor had just spent a little time with us back in the formative years, we might have grown up all the better for it.

And, no matter what else you had to do at work today, unless you were involved in another tragedy, how would you have liked to be faced with meeting with kids coming off their winter break and explaining how something like this could have happened? And how do you deal with their fears, with their tears? I say, let's have a little love for the counselors and therapists among us, and hope this current generation of kids grows up better than m-m-m-m-my ge-ge-generation. Now that they have help on the rocky shoals of life, I believe they will.