I sat on the Monday after the Texas shootings with 60 mostly-millennial college students. My experience with these particular students had revealed them to be engaged, interested, and frankly quite brilliant. Because I found them inspiring, I opened time for them to process and brainstorm the alarming events from the day before. I said the university should be a space where we not only synthesize the events of the past and equip minds for the future, but we must be able to stop and incubate the present moment without stunning clarity or precise action steps. We paused to do the work together while it was still messy. Honestly, I needed to hear from them.
They commenced with 45 minutes of anger, pain, ideas, reflections, but mostly frustration and hopelessness. They whispered suggestions of gun control or increased security while quickly despairing that those wouldn't really matter. Kindness and empathy for each other - especially for those who frustrate us - jiggled some tremors of hopefulness.
If given a room of 500 IU students engaged with the issue of recent mass shootings and ready to give their time to change, what - I asked - would they do when asked to lead them? These standout millennials - known to be activists, minimalists, and critics of the status quo - dropped their heads and said they didn't know. They said the media is so strong, our attention so controlled by it, and government seems so big, they felt powerless against them. Their discouragement resounded in the thick silence.
Quick interpretations that they're lazy or too distracted by their phones or entitled or sheltered didn't satisfy me as valid explanations for their inaction. I thought on their access to information and perspective. I chewed on positive psychology's influence on our outlook, well-being, and engagement. I thought on work I've seen with narrative therapy, and the influence of a powerful story on my own children. I realized the problem wasn't with these students - our future leaders. It's with the story they're hearing. The problem can't be limited to eliminating shooters. We have to change the story we're telling.....because they are listening.
So grown-ups, press, and social media, let our positive stories ring out. Tell the stories of tragedy, pain, broken places, but please - only 49%. Let 51% of our stories celebrate the kindness of a neighbor, the awareness of a friend, the return of lost things, the healing of broken places, the slow, quiet, and undramatic epic stories of our true progress forward in simple humanity. Tell the small stories we live every day. This is not to suggest canned goods as a Polyannish solution for eradicating mass shootings. But if we have trained our brains to hope, then when we stand before 500 people and are asked to lead them we will at least believe that something can be done. Let us model another narrative for these promising millennials. They are starving for vision; let's feed them.
With stubborn hope,
Sara
