One man even suggested that we should consider seeing a counselor ourselves, if you can believe that, Mrs. Mueller said. She snorted at the absurdity of it. Then she began to cry.
Sarah Weinberg and Clifford Jackson from Brooklyn, New York, held a photo of their son Damian up for me to see. In the picture he was grinning broadly, proudly showing the camera a new electric guitar and making a peace sign with this left hand. A birthday present? I asked; Ms. Weinberg nodded. She looked around the room at the other parents.
I don’t know, she said. I don’t feel like we have anything in common with these other people. We’re not really part of the mainstream of American culture and we don’t buy into its capitalist consumerist ideals. Of course, there are stresses associated with being a biracial family but we were conscientious about discussing those openly with Damian, helping him to process his experiences. I just keep asking: why us?
Although most of the conference attendees were Americans, there were some parents who had made the trip from abroad: a couple from London, another from Istanbul. Some Australians and some Germans. A Japanese man told me through a translator that when he went into his daughter’s bedroom to wake her for school in the morning and found her gone, his heart plunged into his stomach. My life ended that day, he said.
I told him, as I’d told the others, how sorry I was for his loss. He nodded and said something to the translator. What about you? Why are you here? the translator relayed. I told him I was covering the conference for a newspaper and showed him my press card. He looked at me, doubtfully. Is that all?
Well, I said, I had a niece. Her mother isn’t here.
Ahh, so desu. he said. He nodded again, like I’d confirmed something he’d guessed already.
The story was the same all over the big, brightly lit, fabric-lined hotel ballroom. All the men and women who were attending the conference told me in their own way that they had been caught completely by surprise by what had happened to their children. By what their children had done.
They insisted that they were good people, that they were or (here several of them corrected themselves, sadly) had been good parents. They’d tried their best to be vigilant against threats to their children’s well-being. They had warned them about strangers and predators and drug pushers. They had encouraged regular exercise. They had been attentive to signs of unchecked mental distress. They had kept up on the latest dangers that loomed up, out there, in the world ready to blight and blast young lives before they had a chance to grow. Mrs. Mueller began to hyperventilate and had to be escorted from the room by her husband. They had done their best.
They were victims themselves as much as their children had been.
Who in your opinion were the perpetrators? I asked. Several of them looked at me aghast and wouldn’t speak to me again.
This was the end of a long day that had begun in the morning with a plenary session addressed by Ms. Carolyn Williams, the driving force behind organizing the conference. She told the assembled attendees that bringing them all together had brought her life meaning after the terrible events of May 17th and that she hoped and prayed that they would find solace in one another’s company, that they would cry together and heal together. That they would find hope to begin to rebuild their lives. Tears streamed down her face.
After that there were break-out groups, then lunch, then a series of panels of people from various disciplines — psychology, sociology, communications, technology — who had studied the phenomenon of 5/17 and tried to illuminate the reasons for its occurrence or to develop reliable methods for preventing something like it happening in the future. The session that I attended was chaired by a psychoanalyst who claimed that the problem was that this generation of children had been raised to view their lives as renewable; cyberspace had fundamentally confused the development of the self-protective ego instincts. The children believed they could simply restart the game when it was over, and so the concept of death had become abstracted to them, vacant; it had ceased to have any sense of gravity.
A man stood up in the back row.
Are you telling me that I raised a son who didn’t know the difference between a video game and reality?
Perhaps not consciously, the psychoanalyst replied. But, yes, somewhere deep in his unconscious, there was a flaw, a fatal error, buried and forgotten, waiting to explode.
Bullshit, said the father in the back row and left the room letting the door slam behind him.
There seemed to be similar disgruntlement with the other professionals who spoke. I passed a group of mothers who were all talking angrily about a social psychologist who had told them that the problem was the isolation in which people now lived. The anxiety of parents about their children’s safety had caused them to curtail the freedom of their children to roam and to have “unstructured” time. As a result, the only genuine playing that these kids did was online, where they built extensive and elaborate networks of trust and interaction stretching far beyond the boundaries of their physical communities. These kids had been conclusively demonstrated to feel pressure to conform and to gain the respect of their peer group, as they did in conventional “real world” peer groups. But the rules for how to do this were different in these widely dispersed networks and worked on a consumerist model — the only model these kids were familiar with. Since the usual measures of social value in American society (wealth, beauty) were stripped away by the medium, the only thing left by which children could measure success or failure was simple: quantity.
So they felt that they had to have more friends than anyone else; and then they needed to show that these weren’t just names on a list but real, genuine bonds, people whom they trusted and who trusted them back. People to whom they were connected in some deep and ineradicable way. What could they do to demonstrate this bond? Well, the evidence was before us all.
The mothers were outraged. They absolutely rejected the man’s explanation of their children’s deaths. He was disrespectful, unfeeling, a crank, a charlatan.
It occurred to me that, really, people didn’t want an explanation of what had happened. They wanted it to remain a mystery now and forever. This was understandable. Any theory that thoroughly and adequately accounted for the May 17th Fires, as they were known in the press coverage afterward, would reduce all these people’s particular children, whom they had loved and cherished as unique, to something standardized, identical, the same. It would erase the individuality of each child, which was all they had left now: the way, for example, Annabel, my niece, loved the word “exceedingly” when she was a child, how she pronounced it as if there were four e’s in it—exceeeedingly. Or how she used to show me her gymnastics every time I visited. Or how she used to climb up the tree in her backyard and hide among the branches until someone came to find her. That was before she turned into an almost-teenager who spent all her time in front of the computer in her room.
Any wholesale explanation for 5/17 would mean that, as far as it affected the most important matter of their young lives, all these different children might as well have been the same child, raised by the same parents. No one wanted to accept that.