Cav's Place

The media is still living off Andrada’s suicide, Andrada being the emo girl I mentioned in my previous post, but now the sensationalism seems to be wearing off and that leaves room for some more serious and balanced comments. It’s not easy to pick them out of the sea of idiocy, but at least they exist.
Many are still focusing on the emo culture and missing the greater issue, but not all do that. Though still misguided, the best reaction I have seen so far is from a newspaper, Evenimentul Zilei (in Romanian), which is taking the issue further, pointing out what it really is. It’s the result of the problems affecting our society as a whole, which could in a way be summed up by one word: Loneliness. Lonely souls living in a lonely world… They’re blowing some things out of proportion and vastly underestimating others, they include stupid or simply meaningless points of view, but overall they seem to be on to something. Something we all know, but very few are willing to admit.

To get it out of the way, I’ll say I find the idea of being emo quite weird. The parts can be understandable taken separately, but when you put it all together there’s something that doesn’t add up. If it all starts from the music, the looks or peer pressure and then leads to depression then it means the depression isn’t real and we’re talking about stupid kids who are too easily influenced to matter. So I’ll ignore those and move on to the ones who start from a real depression caused by real problems, but here I bump into a different problem. The music, cutting and suicide attempts make perfect sense in this scenario, but when you’re depressed you tend to want to be left alone and certainly don’t give a fuck about how you look, so how do you reconcile being depressed with adhering to what appears to be a dress code and meeting in groups?
As a side note, since I mentioned cutting, one of the printed remarks was from therapist Ziegfried Schnapp, who said “they cut themselves because they need to feel something, to feel themselves”. I’m not sure I agree with that, because when I do it it’s mainly to turn some of the emotional pain into physical pain so it will be a little easier to bear, at least for a moment. It’s a way to share the pain with yourself since there is nobody else you can really share it with, nobody willing to help. At least that’s how it is for me, can’t say I know why somebody who identifies themselves as emo does it.
Back to them, I’m likely missing something here, lacking inside information, but I think there’s a major problem in their community as well. I’m talking about those who are actually depressed for good reason and then struggle to follow the other “rules” in order to be accepted among them in hopes of finding others who understand them. Only they don’t find them, or at least not as many as they hoped, because for some of them it’s just a fad. The first contact matters a lot, because if a depressed teen meets those for whom it’s just a fad before others who are just like him or her, said teen might be left feeling even worse than before.
Either way, when a truly depressed person decides to become openly emo, I think it’s an obvious cry for help. They are willing to do what needs to be done to be accepted among others who they think might help them because nobody else can, or at least nobody else wants to. Perhaps, if anything, it means they’re truly willing to do their part to solve their problems, choosing a method that may be no better or worse than many others. It also means they’re better than those who choose to ignore the problems and hope they’ll just go away on their own while they try to be the good little robots society wants them to be.

Which brings us to society. For all it’s advances, the modern society might not be better than those of the past. It creates at least as many problems as it solves and these new problems are more subtle, harder to solve or even notice until it’s too late. But society is only a creation of humans, an experiment if you will. And when you experiment for thousands and thousands of years and never get it right, it seems likely that you are the problem.
We are the problem, all of us. Society can’t go against the will of those who make it up, it’s a simple rule. But that will needs to be expressed strongly enough to counter inertia and the desires of the few who benefit from the current state of events. But our main fault is that we think and act alone, if at all. We are so lonely that we can’t even remember how to work together for a goal, or even agree on a common goal! And what’s worse is that each of us is alone in a crowd, a crowd made up of countless other lonely souls.
One of those articles was titled “Victims of a Broken World”. That’s not only true about emos or teens, as the article seemed to suggest. It’s not even only about everyone who is alive right now. We all are and we all have always been the victims of a broken world, a world that was probably never right and which we keep failing to fix for thousands and thousands of years. So, in the end, we are our own victims and our own executioners at the same time. Yes, some are mainly victims and some are mainly executioners, but we are all both at the same time. We should keep that in mind and work together as a result.

Working together… How can that happen when there are so many “me” and so few “we”? As with any problem, you need to get to the root before you can solve it. I don’t claim to know what the real root of all our society’s problems is, but I know this is at least relatively close to it: We put ourselves first, we don’t care about each other. And when we don’t even care about each other, how could we ever care about the world as a whole? And how can we fix it if we don’t care about it?
How can humanity as a whole realize that we are one? I’m not talking only about humans, I’m saying that everything is connected, each action or inaction sending ripples far and wide. I don’t claim to have the answer, but I know we don’t have to be lonely. Yet we make ourselves be… Yes, some are mainly alone because of choices others have made, some choose it for themselves and yet others choose for others to be alone. The blame is not shared equally, but it is nevertheless shared by all.

It’s interesting how one girl’s death brought such things into focus. Everybody knew them already, teenagers or even children have killed themselves before, so what changed? Why did that one death have such an impact? Why was a death required to start this debate?
One of those articles said “Andrada’s story is not sad only because it ended with blood on gray pavement. It is also sad because the world she lived in is wrong.” Isn’t that true for all of us? How many of our stories are sad at least in part because the world we live in is wrong? Or, better yet, how many are not?
I don’t know why this one death made people come together to talk about this issue, but it’s good that it did. Bad that it took a death, but good that at least that death was not completely in vain. I doubt there will be any real changes, I’m sure it’ll die out and be replaced by something else that catches the public’s eye before a solution to even one of these problems will be found, not that I know what that solution might be, but at least people are talking to each other. And when they talk to each other, they’re just a little less lonely, at least for a little while.