We owe it to the future

There seem to be a lot of “crises” in Olympia – a housing crisis, an opioid crisis, a public safety crisis, a climate crisis. Attaching this moniker has adverse effects on people by creating a false sense of urgency and helplessness and driving otherwise rational people toward the irrational.

Lawmakers better serve the public by toning down the rhetoric. Instead of stoking the flames of division and panic, legislators should offer a positive vision of hope, unity and calm.

There is too much Chicken Little going on in the Legislature’s hallowed halls. If you’re not familiar, it’s a cautionary tale of old about unreasonable fear. Some present-day researchers have said that such doomsdayism can lead to broader societal impacts, eliciting a syndrome by the same name diagnosed as “inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting in paralysis … .” The unfortunate part is that while lawmakers may be paralyzed in solving the problems they’re screaming about, the public is having the opposite response.

I fear that what’s being done to our communities with the constant barrage of alarmism, particularly in our political process, is instilling an immense and unfair sense of dread and hopelessness in our next generation. The news and countless studies are scratching the surface of a looming mental-health disaster facing our young people.

We are seeing spikes in suicidal ideations, high levels of depression and despair. A recent Centers for Disease Control report noted that, three in five teen girls reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” and that teen girls “are experiencing record high levels of violence, sadness and suicide risk.”

How we talk about challenging issues isn’t helping, and our children are paying attention.

The serial alarmism in our public discourse is fracturing our society. While the world is getting smaller thanks to social media, it is simultaneously pushing us further apart. Listening, respect, diversity of more than just immutable characteristics are sidelined in favor of intensifying our differences. I believe the effect is a collective decline in our social mental health that’s presenting itself acutely in our children.

We must see the human in one another if we are to get past unhealthy divisions that are creating a generation of paranoid, sad and hurting kids. It is possible to raise children with a social conscience, with tools to respect each other, embrace difference and be good citizens. However, that’s different from imposing harsh adult concepts on impressionable minds with undertones of dread, otherness and calamity.

That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t have difficult conversations that result in disagreement on important issues. But it does mean moving away from what I see as faulty constructs. The next generation is yearning for belonging, only to find a false sense of community based solely on immediate affirmation that demonizes others with a different world view.

We owe it to future generations to have a little more grace with one another, to have high expectations of our youth while letting them maintain their innocence and offering solutions based in shared hope and optimism for what we can accomplish together.