You'll have to find your own way home, boys...
The oldest was Troy, an eighteen year old boy
Shot dead in March in a robbery
His brother started out to hell and to ruin
Troy's killer was never caught, they say
Young Nick, he just went bad that day
Now he'll have to find his own way home, boys
He'll have to find his own way home
-Tom Waits, The Fall Of Troy
A little while ago, I was sitting with some friends, and we were talking about our childhoods, about accidents, rough games we used to play with other kids, and getting into trouble. Basically, it was about how much more innocent it seemed "back then"---which, for all three of us, was not all that long ago---when there may have been cigarettes, pot, and alcohol, but there weren't any guns, and no one got killed.
As we were talking, though, it occurred to me that at least three of those guys from my neighborhood are now dead. Two brothers who lived in the middle of the block just north of my house, Terry and Ty, became hoodlums fairly young. It was not long for them to graduate from the apples and walnuts we used to throw at each other to knives and guns. Several years ago, maybe as many as ten years now, the younger brother was killed in an armed robbery. Not long afterwards, the elder brother committed suicide. Neither was as old as I am now. I wonder about their mother, how she dealt with it, how she continues to deal with it. As far as I am aware, no one from our old neighborhood knows where she went. Their father killed himself in a fire twenty years ago, when he passed out and dropped his lit cigarette on the bed.
Jeff, who was not the biggest guy in our neighborhood, but was, by all evidence, the meanest and angriest, died just a few years ago. He was drunk, and went stumbling down the railroad tracks in front of an Amtrak train. Was it suicide or an accident? Does it really matter? His family had long given up on him, and they did not claim his body for burial. He is buried somewhere in Lake County, Indiana in an unmarked grave.
Who weeps for the drunk who has given up on life? Who wonders about the value of the lives of these three young men everyone had stopped caring about long ago? I do not hold myself up as any kind of example---I lost track of all three of them a long time ago myself, and probably, somewhere inside, figured something like this would happen. What could I have done if I had cared enough to ask after them---and who would I have asked? Those whose legal responsibility it was to make some effort, i.e. teachers, social workers, and cops had long ago made up their minds about all three of them, and not a one ever graduated, but all three spent some time in the town and county lockups. As for their parents, or, to be specific, their mothers, I know that both of them were decent women, but they both ran out of energy, and they both believed that discipline came in the form of the belt or the broom stick. I witnessed those demonstrations, and the aftermath, more than once. All three of those boys was mean by the age of twelve. After that, everything they endured only increased the level of plain damn mean cussedness in them.
How many more are there? In another context, any of those three, and some others I knew, could have become like Kliebold and Harris, or Cho Seung-Hui. Young men so full of anger and hatred that all that remains alive inside them is the desire to destroy, the desire, in fact, for death---the desire to be both the agent of death, and to be consumed by it.
Thinking about the Tom Waits song I quoted at the top, I want to know why they had to find their own way home. Why didn't somebody care enough to help? Why do we all have to find our own way home? What is it that keeps us from caring, from being able to actually reach out for one another, to love one another? Wouldn't it make sense for us to figure out what that is, and to alter our social relationships so that this was the first thing we thought about every morning? We are, it seems, dehumanized every day in so many ways, that, after a point, we just close off. There is only so much horror one can stomach before numbness becomes absolutely necessary for survival. Again, I am not claiming that I am different. But, dammit, I can't listen to that song, and not think about those boys that I knew---and, in part of my mind, that is still what they are, just boys... trying to find their own way home... just like I was---and am---just like thousands of others.
I am not offering any easy plattitudes, and I am not asking for any. I am not saying anything that others have not said, and probably better. I really am asking, though, that we reflect on our chronic inability to love, that we think about how all of this technology (like this computer at which I am currently sitting) that is supposed to bring us closer actually drives us further apart and alienates us from our own deepest instincts and desires, and from each other.
"And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say 'We will breathe later,' and most do not die, because they are already dead.
It is now or never."
-Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life