INTRODUCTION: T w o YOUNG STUDENTS, a boy and a girl, hanged I themselves from the ends o f a single rope ■ stretched over the bathroom door of their apartment. The Los Angeles Times reports, “ Stand ing on chairs on opposite sides o f the open door, the couple placed the rope, which was tied around their necks, over the top of the door and then kicked the chairs away.” An 18-year-old girl says, “ I tried to commit sui cide last October. I’ve tried to face reality, but I'm not facing it too well. I slashed my wrists, drank 2 bottles o f paregoric and a bottle of laundry bleach. I bled for ten hours before I told anybody I did it.” “ Bring a tube of glue to the funeral. O.K.?” This pathetic epitaph, five empty tubes o f glue, a rifle and three notes were left by two high school boys who agreed to a suicide pact and then carried it out in a motel room. When police arrived, there lay on the floor, in a pool o f blood, two bullet-rid den bodies, a pair o f glue-soaked rags and the dreams o f a lifetime. A police report described the scene: “ His head and face were covered with gauze, like a mummy. A plastic bag covered the gauze and was taped around his neck. A scuba diver’s mask covered the bag and a rubber hose ran from a gas jet beneath all of it. There were two stab wounds, one on the right side of his throat and another under his right arm. A surgical scalpel was found in another room. A roll of masking tape lay near the body. Written on the side o f the tape in blue ink were the words, T shall return.’ Official listing of the death: as phyxiation.” A mother called to say she had just come home to find her 15-year-old son stark naked hanging by a chain from a tree in the back yard. THE BIG HANGUP! Suicide is now the fourth leading cause o f death among high school students and the second leading killer on the college campus. It has become THE BIG HANGUP! The real issue lies at the point o f motivation. What causes young people to become so fed up, so despondent, so confused, so hopeless, or whatever it is in each case, that self-destruction is the only answert Why is the snicide rate for 15-19-year- olds up 48 percent? Perhaps the answers lie in the following four pressure points that are smacking youth right in the face. I . PURPOSELESSNESS ____________________ The Psalmist said that the ungodly are like the “ chaff which the wind drives away.”
People today are having an almost futile battle trying to discover what life is really all about. There is a pervading vagueness and vapidity about life. A constant search for the meaning of existence goes on. A sense o f purposelessness and meaning lessness grips at the throbbing heart of the will to live and enjoy it. It is a grave problem. Modem literature and film-making, certainly the chroniclers of the times, are plagued by futility and cynicism. Says Dr. P. A. Sorokin, former pro fessor o f Sociology at Harvard University: “There has been a growing preoccupation of our writers with the social sewers, the broken homes of dis loyal parents and unloved children, the bedroom of the prostitute, a cannery row brothel, a den of criminals, a ward of the insane, a club o f dishonest politicians, a street corner gang of teenage delin quents, a hate-laden prison, a crime-ridden water front, the courtroom of a dishonest judge, the sex adventures o f urbanized cavemen and rapists, the lures of adulterers and fornicators, o f masochists, sadists, prostitutes, mistresses, playboys . . .” With a list like that as a historical analysis of the existential 20th century, is there any wonder that man is pounded by the pressure o f the mean inglessness and futility of life? Everything, to be rational, must have a purpose. Nobody plays bas ketball on a court with no baskets just because they get a charge out of dribbling up and down. The basket is the thing! And the agonizing question looms, what is the “ thing” o f life? Young people today are faced with the purpose lessness of life as they view their elders, beginning in the microcosm o f the home and stretching to the macrocosm of the world. In America we have an overabundance o f everything—but mostly an over abundance of nothingness— and “ hell seems often more bearable than nothingness,” according to one writer. Behind the wild music, brilliant lights and blinding colors o f their mad, mod, mini world, there is an almost eerie isolation and loneliness. Jack Fox, UPI writer, commenting on current youth attitudes, has said, “A new disillusionment is spreading in the second half of the 1960s, grow ing out of the earlier one but far more serious, more cynical, more hopeless.” The adult world is just as nonplused about the meaning o f life and provides no real help—in many cases not even the faintest attempt at communication. An 18-year-old Atlanta boy said, “ I don’t think adults value and seek anything. They just live. They don’t have any real goals.” An 18-year-old Washington girl believes that adults “ seek the security o f believing there is a Good and a Bad, and that there is a set order to life.” 79% of the teenagers surveyed by Look Maga zine say their parents annoy them, and 57% would leave home if they could. Dave Hull, a Pasadena,
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MARCH, 1969
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