My childhood neighborhood did not raise assassins
I grew up in Bethel Park, the middle-class suburb south of Pittsburgh where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks lived with his parents.
Crooks’ attempt to kill Donald Trump last weekend has filled my old neighborhood with shock and sadness.
Bethel Park is populated by decent, salt-of-the-earth people — people such as my mom and dad who moved there in 1964 to raise their six children in a safe, friendly community with big yards and good schools.
Like many kids in my neighborhood in the 70s, I attended St. Germaine Catholic Elementary School.
The nuns there taught us to embrace the virtues: prudence, temperance and courage.
They demanded we fend off the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.
They also made us sit up straight and keep our shirts tucked in.
I didn’t know it then, but the good sisters gave us the gift of moral clarity — and what they taught us worked.
The vast majority of my St.Germaine classmates went on to live healthy, productive and happy lives.
So did most of the kids who graduated with me in 1980 at Bethel Park High School — where Crooks would have a troubled and unhappy time four decades later.
At 20, Crooks was a member of Generation Z. We don’t know yet what his unique inner demons were. But we do know that many in the Zoomer generation are struggling.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains their troubles in his book, “The Anxious Generation.”
Haidt says the combination of helicopter parents and social media have rewired childhood for kids born after 1995, creating an epidemic of anxiety, depression and suicidality.
As it goes, parents have over-protected post-1995 children in their home lives, but under-protected them in their digital lives, where powerful, negative online forces overwhelm the positive influence of parents, churches and teachers.
To be sure, the mindset of America’s first smartphone generation doesn’t echo my generation’s in any way:
– Only 26% of Zoomers have faith in God/religion vs. 65% of Boomers, according to a Public Opinion Strategies/NBC News poll.
– About 2 percent of Boomers identify as LGBTQ , but 16 percent of Zoomers do, according to a Gallup survey.
– Zoomers are less than half as likely to be proud to be American, according to a 2023 Gallup poll.
– Four in 10 Zoomers say the Founding Fathers are better described as villains than heroes, and 75% think the nation demands dramatic change, according to a Democracy Fund survey.
Generationally speaking, we tail-end Boomers had it made. The basic values that were infused in us by our parents, neighbors, churches and teachers gave us the tools that helped us flourish as adults.
It is heartbreaking to see that the simple values we were taught — the tried-and-tested values that have been passed down for many generations — are not being transferred fully to younger generations, such as the Zoomers.
My heart aches for the Comperatore family that lost its brave and good father Corey at Trump’s rally, and also two other shooting victims, who are still in critical condition.
My heart also aches for the very confused young man from my old neighborhood who threw his life away and caused so many people so much unnecessary pain.
Whatever his motives were, his horrific act is a reflection of the political hatred that divides us.
Sadly, in our modern confusion, any community — even salt-of-the-earth communities, such as Bethel Park — can give birth to a troubled, would-be assassin. – Copyright 2024 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.