"One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation's mental health during the crisis." --Politico (Aug. 13)
A particularly horrible thing about the ancient cult of Moloch is that it involved child sacrifice. Canaanites looked at the universe with anxiety, worried about bad things to come and needing favors, so to alleviate their concerns they made an offering of their kids.
If Moloch actually existed and truly needed young skin and bone to be at peace, this might have made sense. But I've never met anyone who believes in Moloch. You haven't either. Sacrificing kids to Moloch was a bad idea.
Circumstances change but themes in human nature don't. Read the quote at the top of this article and consider the costs of our bowing to what Franklin Roosevelt once called "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." Have one in four young people recently considered suicide because the virus is a great threat to them? Surely the media has successfully scared some youth out of their wits, but most know that driving a car is more dangerous to them than the virus. In the first two weeks of August, more than 1,100 Americans between the ages of 5 and 24 died. Of these, just 17 are listed as having died from covid-19. Those are 17 tragedies, but there are obviously greater threats to the young.
Even among a more endangered group -- those between 75 and 84 years -- less than 10 percent of the 27,000 Americans who left this world in the first two weeks of August are recorded as dying from the coronavirus.
A global count of 804,000 virus deaths seems high, but then we remember that the mostly empty state of Montana has a population of 998,000. A national figure of 176, 000 virus deaths seems high, but the figure of nearly 650,000 Americans who died last year from heart disease is much higher. Perspective matters.
Whatever else is going on, our young have had fear instilled into them, public debt piled onto them, key life events taken from them, and their educations have been damaged or derailed. Many of them must be exhausted by older people who, in the name of concern, have hemmed them in at every turn and made anything like normal life impossible.
Upon learning from the Center for Disease Control that a consequence of intense anti-virus measures is a tsunami of young people thinking of ending their lives, a sane society would pause and ask where things had gone too far. But the news seems to have had no impact on the public culture. Media coverage continues as if the CDC memo had never been issued. The hysteria goes on, and virus case numbers continue to be broadcast in red letters, while the fact that few cases lead to serious illness, and far fewer to death, is ignored or downplayed. Meantime, legions of lawyer-predators are ready to extract gore from any institution that can in any way be construed as "negligent." And so, in the name of exercising "an abundance of caution," the kids go into the fire.
At some point we have to say that what we've done and continue to do to our young people isn't just questionable or unwise but profoundly, deeply wrong. The devil himself sometimes appears as an angel of light, and we can talk all day about "caring" and "safety," but pushing young people to the cliff for dubious reasons is beyond moral explanation.
This morning I tried to think of my students. All I saw were masks and eyes -- no individuals. Thanks to the edicts of a few policy-makers whose own livelihoods are secure, these young people have basically been asked to stop acting like the social creatures normal humans are -- and to be prepared to do so indefinitely. Youth sequestered at home face deeper isolation.
Responsible adults -- teachers, professors, pastors, counselors and others -- are doing what they can to mitigate the ill effects, but do we really believe this can continue without even more serious short- and long-term psychological costs? Do we need to wait until the number of youth thinking of ending their lives rises to 50 percent?
Look again at the quote above this article. What in the world are we doing?
We know who is most jeopardized by the virus, and it isn't healthy young people. We understand that this moment calls for heightened caution. We can protect the vulnerable without losing our minds, without sacrificing our kids.
-- Preston Jones is a Siloam Springs resident and history professor. The opinions expressed are those of the author.