My best friend’s 13-year-old son recently asked me to friend him on the social media app BeReal.

She had decided to let him download BeReal partially because it lets users post just once per day and has very limited chat features, and only under the condition that they had to be friends. But he was free to choose what and when to post, what to comment, and whom to befriend (including, to my amusement, me). My friend was treating it like a learner’s-permit version of Instagram or Facebook. Her son could drive his social media car, but only with an adult present in the front seat.

Like many parents and caregivers, her aim was to develop a way for her son to safely learn about and prepare for our increasingly virtually connected world, while still respecting his right to speech and self-expression in an age-appropriate manner. This vision of adolescence as a driver’s permit to adult-sized rights regularly emerges in my work as a historian of law and childhood. Throughout histories of childhood and youth, my profession is examining the boundaries of young people’s rights in various contexts, from medical consent to due process rights that have contemporary political implications.

But in some states, the law may soon criminalize these very actions.

In the wake of remote learning’s increased screen time and the rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation, predominately conservative lawmakers have been raising a new round of moral panic over young people’s mental health and their exposure to adult content. Their push for a radical new vision of internet access is rooted in political fears about youth and social media, and threatens decades of free speech protections.

There is a long history of moral panics around youth and the popular technology of their eras. The Victorians worried that bicycles enabled teens and unmarried adults to avoid chaperones, and that they contributed to a growing popularity of bloomers over dresses or skirts. For Cold War parents, comic books symbolized the rise of the violent and crazed juvenile delinquent and sparked a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation. These panics were less a reaction to reality, but rather, they represented cyclical anxieties of generational segregation and control over young people.

Foundational child protection law is already in place in the United States. In 1998, the Federal Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibited the collection of online data from online users under the age of 12. In 2013, it was amended to expand its reach. But now, state lawmakers want legislation that would criminalize internet access for millions of Americans.

For adults, this legislation has focused on limiting access to pornography. But more changes in process are targeting young people’s social media usage. In Texas, state representative Jared Patterson filed H.B. No. 896 last December, which would have banned any person under the age of 18 from using social media apps, and allowed parents to request the removal of their children’s social media accounts. Though the bill failed to pass, undeterred conservatives in Utah pushed forward a similar bill, quickly passed and signed into law this March, which prohibits minors from having any social media accounts. It also has created a nearly unenforceable “internet curfew.”

While the Utah and Texas cases represent the most extreme measures in the new efforts to control youth internet access, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has also introduced the more seemingly palatable Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a revamped version of the previously rejected Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which aims to censor material considered potentially “harmful.” Yet, as law and technology expert Mike Masnick has written, with no clear definition of “harmful content,” state attorney generals can define the term as it suits them, and use it to target websites they want blocked for ideological reasons. Last year, over 90 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups signed a letter in protest of KOSA.

It’s true that there is content on the internet that poses dangers to minors. The media has featured heartbreaking stories of cyberbullying and online predators. But it’s because of those dangers that nuance in lawmaking is so critical. Blanket bans replicate the very dangers they are designed to prevent: Strict parental controls create a ring of invisibility around domestic abuse, while increasing data collection from all Americans, child or adult.

Likewise, while studies have pointed to social media’s impact on mental health, banning it won’t solve the youth mental health crisis, as the legislation suggests. Social media is just one part of American childhood today, alongside rampant gun violence, anti-LGBTQ+ fascism, and endemic economic inequality.

And then there’s the First Amendment. By seeking to purge children from the internet, conservative lawmakers are denying young people the right to expression, speech, and creativity. Stripping them of their right to speak out on platforms, often about issues that impact them directly, runs counter to decades of precedent for young people.

Young people had their earliest First Amendment victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), when siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker, who had been expelled for their silent protest of the Vietnam War, argued that their rights to free speech did not end at the entrance of their public school. The Supreme Court agreed. Subsequent decisions, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Morse v. Frederick (2007), upheld Tinker’s basic ruling, while carving out caveats in favor of school administrators. But until 2021, the Supreme Court had yet to deal with a case regarding youth free speech and the internet.

Then came the memorably named “Cursing Cheerleader” case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. After a student recorded and uploaded a Snapchat story featuring a caption cursing and criticizing her high school, school administrators suspended her from the junior varsity cheerleading team. The case asked the Court if Tinker applied to a student’s social media post. With an 8-1 decision, the Court found that it did. (Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole dissent, argued for a chipping away of Tinker in favor of schools and parents.)

When Utah’s latest social media ban is inevitably challenged in court, the state will need to argue against these Supreme Court rulings that uphold youth First Amendment protections. But it takes time for a case to make its way through the courts. Until then, this law and others like it will deny young people their right to be online, while creating a much more dangerous digital landscape for the very children they allege to protect.

Though the internet isn’t perfect, it can be a space of creativity and intellectual engagement for youth. Ranging from budding craftspeople learning to operate a business, to youth activists working on climate change and LGBTQ rights, young people wield their digital literacy for positive efforts, often using social media in the process. Banning their social media use will merely push them to further hide their online activity, and to speak less freely about the issues they face in digital spaces. It criminalizes their attempts to learn to live in a virtual world and ignores the necessity of the internet for modern life.

It’s better to arm the young people in our lives with digital literacy and open dialogue. Take a page from my friend’s parenting book, give them space to learn, post silly pictures, and teach you a thing or two. And, while we’re at it, encourage them to get outside and ride a bike—no matter the legwear they choose.

The post Let the Kids “BeReal” on Social Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The school year is under way and the kids, we are told, are not all right.

America’s families are suffering through what a recent front-page story in the New York Times called a “Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens.” Rates of depression, anxiety, emergency room visits, and suicide rose by double-digit percentages in the past decade and worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a special adolescent mental health advisory issued late last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a “devastating” decline in youth mental health caused by an “unprecedented” array of challenges, including pandemic disruptions, political turmoil, social inequities, and escalating technology use.

My kids, Frannie and Benjamin, are 15 and 12. Our family lives in New York City, where we rode out the dark days of the pandemic in our house on 99th Street. My wife, Kate, is an Episcopal priest, and leads a medium-sized parish in Manhattan. I’m a part-time editor at Guideposts, a non-profit religion journalism magazine.

The pandemic exposed our kids to at least six of the nine mental health risk factors identified in the surgeon general’s advisory. Their school went remote and they lost in-person contact with teachers, coaches, and friends. People in our parish got sick. Some died. The church cemetery crematorium (which serves people from all of New York City, not just our parish) ran 18 hours a day, for months. White refrigerated trucks filled with dead bodies rumbled through our neighborhood, accompanied by a police escort.

We participated in protest marches after the death of George Floyd and saw wreckage after things turned violent. There was a stabbing around the corner from our house, and a shooting on our block. An unlocked garbage shed across the street became a popular place for people to hang out and use drugs. At one point, so many people fled our neighborhood, the kids played a game on dog walks, furnishing an imaginary apartment with all the furniture discarded on the sidewalks.

Yet, despite everything, our kids not only survived the pandemic, but thrived. Today, Frannie, who began 2020 as a socially insecure seventh grader, is a happy and well-adjusted sophomore in high school pursuing an interest in archeology and playing volleyball. Benjamin started seventh grade this year. Except for some eye-rolling at what he calls the “drama” of middle school life, he, too, is happy and engaged, focused on his scout troop, his schoolwork, and making Lego stop motion movies.

As a parent, I marveled at our kids’ resilience. As a journalist, I wondered where it came from. Kate and I are not particularly talented parents. There were no ingenious pandemic survival hacks in our household. We made it up day by day, just like everyone else.

One explanation emerged from stories I worked on, including one about resilience in a faith-based after-school program in Chicago. My reporting led me to Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame, who referred to what he called “gobs of work that shows the pro-social, pro-health, pro-everything effects of religion” on mental health.

I began to wonder whether growing up in church had helped our kids ride out the storm.

Kate and I are Christians. Kate grew up religious. I came to faith later in life. We have raised our kids in the various churches where Kate has served as a priest. Our family life is guided by our spiritual beliefs. We pray at meals, at bedtime, and before we make big decisions or undertake major endeavors. We keep a Sabbath on Saturday and spend a good portion of each Sunday at church. We try to think of our lives in terms of how we use our gifts to serve others. Note that I said try. Our family’s efforts to live up to our standards often fall comically short. As a wise friend of ours says, you can’t always do what you can sometimes do.

Research suggests we’re at least doing something. Recent studies at Stanford and Brigham Young universities found that religiously involved teens suffered lower rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, family instability, and school setbacks during the pandemic. A major survey of mental health research conducted before and during the pandemic by scholars at Harvard University came to similar conclusions. Frequent attendance at religious services, the survey found, correlates with elevated levels of personal well-being, happiness, and quality of life, and lower levels of depression and suicide. For adolescents specifically, religious service attendance correlates with lower rates of smoking, drinking, drug use, and risky sexual behavior.

Other recent studies have found that religious involvement helps lower-income boys succeed in school and endows teens of all backgrounds with what Columbia University researcher Lisa Miller calls a “spiritual wholeness” that guards against an array of mental health challenges.

“Kids who are religiously involved are doing way better than non-religious kids,” Notre Dame’s Smith told me. Smith and other experts attribute religion’s unique benefits to the combination of a larger spiritual perspective with the community support of regular service attendance. Spirituality alone or membership in a secular community organization don’t provide the same protective “spiritual wholeness.”

Our family’s church, St. Michael’s, is a 215-year-old congregation serving people from all strata of a diverse urban parish—lawyers, professors, social workers, semi-homeless drug users, public housing residents, elders on fixed incomes, descendants of Caribbean immigrants, and students. The building is a hive of activity, housing a Spanish-language preschool, a neighborhood feeding program, homework tutoring, an orchestra for underprivileged youth, 12-step groups, and other community programs. The prevailing mood is welcoming love combined with barely controlled chaos. It seems to have been a nourishing place to grow up.

Our kids don’t always welcome the ways Christianity (at least as it’s lived at St. Michael’s) pushes back against American individualism and consumerism, especially when, as the kids put it, our family “acts weird and can’t afford stuff.” Yet, faith has helped our kids bypass some of the crueler passages of adolescence. When things get rough at school, there are always church friends to fall back on. When problems seem insoluble, we close our eyes and picture placing the mess in God’s hands: “We’ve done what we can. God will have to handle the rest.” During the pandemic, we talked a lot about discerning the difference between things we can and can’t control. Despite everything they endured, our kids never seemed to doubt that, eventually, in ways they couldn’t foresee or put into words, they’d be okay.

Kids in the Chicago after-school program expressed similar thoughts. Fifteen-year-old Azariah Baker experienced even more of the surgeon general’s risk factors than my kids did. She lives in Austin, a neighborhood on Chicago’s west side where COVID-19 death rates were high and businesses reeled after looting during social justice protests. She also has asthma and worries about her mother, who, she said, “is really old.”

Yet, Azariah spent most of her conversation with me talking not about challenges but about her involvement with By the Hand Club, a faith-based provider of youth social services in Chicago public schools. With help from donors, the club bought a looted liquor store in Austin and turned it into a teen-run community produce market. “My resume is going to be buzzing,” Azariah said.

“God has always been a really important part of my life,” she told me. “It can get overwhelming sometimes…[and my mom] says, ‘Take it up with God. He’ll fix it in the end.’ My job as Azariah is to be kind to others and be Azariah, and everything else is God’s responsibility.”

Neither the surgeon general’s 53-page advisory nor the New York Times’ 3,800-word front-page story mentions religion. The omission is understandable, given America’s polarized views about faith.

As a religion journalist, I can attest that the landscape of faith in America is far larger and more compassionate than our nation’s inordinate focus on evangelicals would suggest (or than evangelicals themselves, perhaps, would wish). As a parent, I can attest that a loving, welcoming religious community can work wonders in kids’ lives.

Our family couldn’t have gotten through the pandemic—or the rest of life, for that matter—without it.

The post Keeping the Kids’ Faith appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My depression was triggered by The Lion King. Watching Scar throw Simba’s father to his death, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I was 11, terrified something would happen to my mom—my lifeline, and the parent who had removed us from an abusive situation six years earlier. That night, it felt like a dark room opened inside my chest, filled with feelings I couldn’t name.

The room stayed with me—sometimes growing larger, containing hopelessness and instances of self-harm, and sometimes emptying, only to fill up again with a new sense of despair. Ashamed of this endless loop, I struggled with how to integrate mental illness into my personal narrative.

Those feelings were the catalyst for my new children’s novel, Zia Erases the World, the story of an 11-year-old girl facing her first depression. Zia doesn’t know how to talk about her room of shadows, which she calls the Shadoom, and keeps her secret locked inside her. Upon discovering a magical dictionary that can erase whole concepts from existence, Zia erases fear, pain, and sadness. After the world unravels as a result, she has to make it right.

When I speak at schools around the country, I share two stories: Zia’s, and my own. I acknowledge that today’s students face realities I never imagined, from accelerating climate change to active shooter drills. In 2019 more than 1 in 3 high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a 40 percent increase since 2009. That same year, 21 percent of American children reported having had a major depressive episode at some point.

In December 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a landmark advisory on the youth mental health crisis—which he called “alarming” before the pandemic and “devastating” after a year and a half of quarantines and isolation.

But if tweens and teens were given the chance to shape their own narratives, what would they say?

I decided to find out by speaking with them directly. Most of the young people I interviewed were strangers to me. But after more than a dozen interviews, I got to know Diemond, Camryn, Iona, Jaime, Wyatt, and Rayan, all of whom asked me to use their first names for this piece. “Depression feels like a bad dream,” said Diemond, a 19-year-old from New York. “The same dream over and over, and you can’t wake up.”

Camryn, an 18-year-old from Illinois, described depression as “a lot more than just feeling sad. It’s those ups and downs. Feeling empty and not having motivation to get out of bed, brush my hair, brush my teeth.”

Iona spoke to me outside their therapist’s office, two days before their 11th birthday. For them, the depression began as numbness. “When my dog got sick, I felt absolutely nothing. I couldn’t grieve or cry. That was tough. My dog passed away and I didn’t feel anything. It was just like if a snail died.”

“I got worse,” Iona went on. “I started feeling again, and I wanted to hurt myself.” These desires “weren’t scary to me at the time—I just thought they were normal and this happened to everybody. Now that I’m better and taking medication, I realize those weren’t normal thoughts.”

As I conducted more interviews, I noticed that the young people who identified as female or non-binary spoke more about depression. Those who identified as male spoke more about anxiety. My sample size was admittedly small—according to the CDC, boys and girls report similar levels of anxiety. But the statistics do point to higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide among girls.

Jaime, a fifth grader from Los Angeles, told me by phone how he tries to stave off his anxiety attacks by focusing on something else. “But sometimes it feels like you’re delaying the feeling, and then it builds up like water boiling. You get that low heat and it starts to simmer, and then you notice it and think, ‘I’ve gotta turn down the heat.’ But at some point, you’ve just gotta throw in the pasta. You gotta let it boil. And then let it pass. Just try not to burn down the house.”

Despite the subject matter, these weren’t depressing conversations. One mom shared that her son came out of his room “looking a foot taller.” He told her, “It felt so good to talk about everything.”

That was the one resounding common thread in all the interviews: Talking helps. Young people don’t want to be forced to talk, but having even one person they feel safe opening up to makes a huge difference, whether it’s a teacher, therapist, parent, or friend.

For 13-year-old Wyatt, the anxiety and depression began in third grade. “My uncle, my grandma, my cousin, and my cat all died, which was pretty hard for me,” he said. Eventually, he tried counseling. It took a couple of counselors to find the right fit, but the second one gave Wyatt tools that helped him move through the grief. “In my house we had this little corner with soft blankets and squishy things. Me and my mom set it up. It felt like you were getting hugged by a whole bunch of penguins. We called it the ‘Cozy Corner.’ I could go lie down and burrow in for a couple minutes or a couple hours, close my eyes and relax.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic came up often, and many acknowledged a pervasive sense of loss. “I’m 11,” Jaime said. “Covid was 25 percent of my life. When things finally started to get better, my mom took me to Trader Joe’s, and I just walked around remembering half the products in the store. ‘Look at the Fig Newtons! Look at the mango popsicles!’ I was having the time of my life. Only later did I get sad. I realized what a big part of my childhood I missed.”

Rayan, a high school senior from Syracuse, used the time to be more creative. “I created my first ever documentary during the pandemic,” she told me. “It covered my daily routine, coming to the United States, the fears of being an outsider. I have so many things people hate. I’m Black, I’m Muslim, I’m female.”

When I asked Rayan about mental health, she said she doesn’t like to talk about her emotions. But watching her quiet, haunting documentary, it’s abundantly clear she has found other means of self-expression. “When I write, it’s kind of like I’m talking to my emotions,” she said. “If nobody is listening, at least my notebook will listen to me.”

As a writer, I believe in the power of artistic expression to heal, comfort, and connect. Shaping our own narratives can help us find light amid the shadows: something the tweens and teens I spoke to did with stunning clarity and courage.

As a child, I was fortunate to have adults in my life I could open up to. After The Lion King, I told my mom what I was feeling, and she immediately found a mental health professional to offer support. Even so, it took many years before I could find the right words for my experience. But as I speak more publicly about my depression in the wake of Zia Erases the World, it has put me on a path parallel to Zia’s. Inspired by the honesty of the children and young adults I’ve met, I’m trying to embrace mental illness as a part of my narrative. And by naming my most private pain, my darkest secret, I hope to help young people feel the same way they’ve made me feel: less alone.

At my last school visit, a fifth grader asked: “When did your Shadoom go away?”

The answer, much like depression itself, is complicated. It did go away, and it didn’t.

But what I told her—what I tell everyone I speak to—is that you are always adding tools to aid in your self-care. Therapy. Medication. Friends. Art. Music. Books. If you can name your own dark room, the people in your life can rise up to meet you. Mental health struggles become a means of connection, not isolation. And instead of erasing your story, you tell it as a way to survive.

The post How the Kids Are Getting to All Right appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Gutman and her boyfriend, May Kogan, whom she met through Magshimim, will spend this summer working at a camp for Israeli teenagers studying cybersecurity. They have just completed a final project that involved building an application to let teachers remotely control the computers of their students in order to administer an online class in the event that school is canceled due to “a war, or snow” (“what we have and what you have,” Gutman explained to me, referencing the different reasons for canceling school in Israel and the United States).

Many countries, including the United States, have programs designed to teach elementary and high school students coding and computer science skills; many have programs aimed at attracting diverse students to those subjects. But Israel—in large part because of the constant threat of war or cyber attack—is one of the only nations to boast a thriving program for training teenagers from underrepresented groups to focus specifically on cybersecurity.

Beginning in ninth grade, Israeli teenagers from the nation’s “periphery” (that is, outside the well-populated and wealthier cities in Israel) are screened for the afterschool cybersecurity program, which places a particular emphasis on recruiting girls. Magshimim was launched in 2011 by the Rashi Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on supporting underprivileged Israeli youth, and has been co-sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Defense since 2013. More than 530 students have successfully completed the program, and it is in the process of trying to scale up the size of its classes tenfold, from roughly 400 students to 4,800 participants over the course of the next five years.

Magshimim accepts roughly 30 percent of the students who apply, following a series of tests and interviews during which the program screens for determination, dedication, and sociability—but not prior computing experience. That’s how Gutman and students like Revital Baron, 17, were able to make the cut, despite having no background in computing. “I just knew how to use Facebook and play computer games,” Baron said of her familiarity with computers prior to entering Magshimim. Now she, like Gutman, is finishing the program and has built, for her final project, a robot that can create a visual map of the space it occupies using ultrasonic sensors to compute the distance from walls and other obstacles.

The students selected for the program attend three-hour cybersecurity training sessions after school two days per week from 10th through 12th grade. Over the course of three years, they work on programming projects, study computing theory, implement cryptographic protocols, reverse-engineer malware, and study the architecture and design of computer networks. They finish high school with a skillset comparable to that of many college juniors and seniors who study computer science in the United States. (Many of them also finish high school fluent in English—a skill born of many hours poring over the forums on Stack Overflow to help answer technical questions, they told me.)

In the short term, these students are being groomed to enter the Israeli Defense Force’s elite cyber branches during their compulsory military service. In particular, the teenagers in Magshimim hope to join Unit 8200, the intelligence and cybersecurity team featured in Richard Behar’s recent Forbes article as “Israel’s secret startup machine” because so many of its alums enter the private sector and launch successful tech (and often specifically security) companies. If Unit 8200 provides the pipeline for Israel’s start-up economy, then Magshimim provides the pipeline for Unit 8200.

In the United States, we talk a lot about the “pipeline problem” in technology—the lack of women and underrepresented minority students finishing college with degrees in engineering and computer science and the resulting lack of diversity at many major tech firms. Israel is concerned about these same issues, and so Magshimim is not just any pipeline—it’s specifically designed to recruit from underrepresented populations in cybersecurity, including girls, religious students, and children outside the major cities. To attract these populations into cybersecurity, it’s important to recruit students when they’re young, before they form too many ideas about what they can and can’t do or should and shouldn’t be interested in, before they begin to feel that they’ve already fallen behind and can’t compete with their peers. In fact, the program is now working on extending its recruitment even earlier, to include training for eighth and ninth graders.

Perhaps in part because “Magshimim not only looks for smart people, but also social people,” one student told me, and perhaps in part because it includes so many girls, the students in Magshimim are an astonishingly outgoing bunch. When I was visiting Israel recently for their 2016 Cyberweek symposium at Tel Aviv University, which included a Youth Conference for hundreds of Israeli high school students studying cybersecurity, many of them were eager to tell me how important the program has been for them socially, as well as technically.

“I really feel like Magshimim is my second home,” Baron said. “All of my best friends are from Magshimim.” Gutman and Kogan, meanwhile, are quick to credit the program with their relationship. A WhatsApp group keeps all of the seniors in the program across Israel, some 150 students, connected online, and the program also hosts regular overnight “Cyber Nights” and challenge events that seem to combine elements of military or law enforcement exercises with the free-food, stay-up-all-night ethos of the hack-a-thons that are commonplace on American college campuses.

For instance, one Magshimim event, a few years ago, required students to investigate a stolen pizza delivery by accessing a building’s security feeds to retrieve surveillance video footage of the theft. “Then we found the pizza and we ate it,” recalled Omer Greenboim Friman. In another exercise, there was a simulated crisis in which the building’s internet access had been completely shut off and the students had to find a way to re-establish connectivity with the outside world.

Underlying all of Israel’s efforts to ramp up its cybersecurity education and training programs is the sense that such threats (internet blackouts, not pizza theft) are never very far away and that no one is too young to be thinking about and preparing for them. The students in Magshimim make it clear in conversation—sometimes to an extent that feels shocking to an observer from another country—that they understand this is about war.

“We are a little country and we have a lot of enemies so we need to secure our data,” Kogan said. “When we were just kids we didn’t have anything we could do about these threats, but now when we are getting into the army we finally have the power to do something about it.” Similarly, Gutman told me, “I really want to go to the army and contribute. My dream is maybe to stay in the army.”

It’s almost inconceivable to imagine hundreds of tech-savvy teenagers in the United States feeling that way about, say, joining the NSA. Daniel Ninyo, another Magshimim senior, has a life plan that might seem more familiar to U.S. high school students: After serving in the IDF, he hopes to launch a start-up company.

When students in the United States get excited about computer science, their interest often lies in building new tools for social change or games or slick, marketable apps, rather than security. Two uniformed soldiers in a classroom would be unlikely to pique the interest of many U.S. high school freshmen the way that they did Gutman’s. So is it possible to replicate the success of a program like Magshimim in the United States? In some regards, absolutely. The United States is, of course, a much larger country than Israel, with a much more decentralized education system and no compulsory military service. But it could still support competitive, well-regarded cybersecurity afterschool programs that target students from underrepresented communities who have no prior coding experience and offer them not just classes but also a rich social environment, regular mentoring from older alums of the program, and, occasionally, pizza.

And yet—it takes more than pizza to create a program that is held in as high regard as Magshimim, both by its participants and the rest of the country. (“I was in a restaurant with my friends once and the waitress looked at us and she said, ‘Are you guys from Magshimim, that cool cyber program?’” Gutman recalled.) To care deeply, passionately about security, I realize as I speak with the Magshimim students, it helps to feel truly, immediately threatened.

The post Do Israeli Teens Offer a Solution to Silicon Valley’s Pipeline Problem? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mother was in the kitchen doing what she characteristically does on a Saturday, making spaghetti sauce, meatballs, sausage, and braciole for the week. The comforting aroma of sautéed garlic, onions, and tomatoes cooking with the frying meat filled the house. I treasured Saturdays for the simple reason that I felt loved.

Two of my older sisters were upstairs in their rooms doing whatever. (Bonnie, the oldest, was away at college.) Being the youngest of four girls, followed later by my brother Tommy, I was never included in their affairs, and pretended not to care much, since they ridiculed me whenever I was with them. And so being downstairs alone with the laundry and the hockey game suited me just fine.

Saturdays, my dad was at his store working. On Sundays, though, Dad and I watched football together. I loved watching sports with my father. It was one of the few times I felt the closeness he and I once shared before my brother was born. Then I became like my sisters; girls with whom he didn’t know how to communicate or show outward signs of affection. But watching football together was our bonding time. Except when he decided to root for teams who were not from New York.

“Get out of the room!”

“What?! Why? New York is winning.” I’d be completely confused.

“Out. Now!” He’d say as his jaw clenched and his finger pointed threateningly at me.

He never explained why he would, at times, change his New York affiliation, but then, he never explained much of anything. He didn’t make sense to me sometimes, my father. Yet on this day, this Saturday, I began to understand who my father was and how to play outside of the rules.

There was an abrupt knock on the family room door. Since my brother’s friends entered through that door, I called out, “Come in,” while keeping my eyes glued to the game and continuing to fold the towels. After a slight beat, there was another knock. This time more forcefully.

“It’s open!” I said with annoyance, not knowing where my brother was or why my brother’s friends suddenly developed a hearing impediment. But again, more knocks.

Irritated, I got up to answer the door. As I swung it open, a gold badge and an identification card with a blurred picture of a man’s face was shoved within millimeters of mine. It was thrust so close to my nose that my eyes couldn’t focus to read what I assumed I was supposed to be reading.

“I’m lieutenant so-and-so of the FBI.”

He was a tall man in a dark suit. “Is your father home?”

Without waiting for a response or an invitation, his arm stretched out several feet like a Gumby toy and brushed me and my pile of towels aside as he entered the family room. When my eyes and mind refocused, I saw three other men standing in the garage. They were the biggest men I had ever seen.

Two were dressed in similar outfits of red plaid flannel shirts, khaki pants, and work boots. The third man behind the intruder wore a dark suit as well. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, he just followed suit, no pun intended, and entered the house after the man with the badge. The other two men in plaid flannel and khakis walked past me into my family’s home. No one bothered to wait for an invitation.

“Come on in,” I muttered sarcastically under my breath.

Though I did not understand exactly why these four oversized men were in our home looking for my father, I sensed my dad’s odd little nightly rituals had something to do with it.

The author’s father (third from the left), standing behind his mother and with other members of his family in 1941.

 
My father, Angelo, was a generous man, a self-made man with only a high school education who treasured his family. He was a storyteller, a raconteur, whose charm amused those he enjoyed entertaining.

His mother, Teresa, was an industrious and formidable woman, not unlike the icon from Calcutta. She made things by hand (doilies, handkerchiefs) and started selling small dry goods out of her two-bedroom flat in the Italian section of Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood. Business went so well that her husband Carmelo, a mason by trade, built a department store across the street with two apartment dwellings on the second floor. Thus, the family business was established. When my father returned from World War II, he moved into one of the flats upstairs and ran the department store with my grandmother.

The store was successful not only because it provided for the needs of the small immigrant community, but also because my father had a personal touch with his customers. He took great care in measuring a proper fit for their new shoes. He covered their children’s schoolbooks with plastic, provided money order service for those without a bank account, and supplied goods from dresses to toiletries.

The author’s grandfather, renovating a building so the family could run a department store on the first floor and live on the second.

***

As the four massive men stood looking around the family room, I called for my mother, who was in the kitchen oblivious to the intrusion.

“Ma, these men are here to see Dad.”

My mother came out from the kitchen wiping her hands on the mapine (Italian slang for dishtowel). As she graciously extended her arm with a smile to greet them, the large man in the dark suit said, “Ma’am, I have a warrant for your husband’s arrest.”

My mother’s smiling countenance dropped liked the ball at Times Square, as if a shock went through her body from head to toe. The four giant men then circled her like dogs with their prey. My small, agile body quickly slipped by them unnoticed as I dashed upstairs, knowing that any incriminating evidence they were looking for needed to be found, hidden, and destroyed. What that evidence was exactly I wasn’t certain, but I knew what it looked like, and so did my sisters. We saw it almost every evening after dinner.

Dinner was a nightly ritual. It was my father’s insistence that we eat together as a family, something that I could never understand. It’s not as if he waxed poetic at the dinner table. He just wanted us all there, together. It didn’t occur to me back then that it was probably the only time he saw his family together in one place at one time, given his seven-day work week. For me, it was just another rule by which I had to abide.

When dinner was over, we girls would clean up. My brother was allowed to go off and play. My father remained at the head of the table and took out a brown paper bag or a shoebox from the store, or both. He waited patiently as we wiped the table clean and dried it. Then he’d pour the contents of the shoebox or bag out onto the tabletop.

They were always the same type of items: narrow rolls of paper, the kind taken from a small adding machine, and other individual bits of paper held together by paper clips. He used the paper bag to make his notes, or if it were a shoebox, he’d write on the back of its lid. On these small bits of paper were odd writings—two or three letters with a dash followed by numbers, none of which made sense to me.

“Dad, what are those numbers?” I’d ask.

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say with a Brooklyn accent.

My father wasn’t from Brooklyn—his cousins were—and he didn’t normally speak with a Brooklyn accent, but there were certain words he would pronounce as if he were raised in Bensonhurst.

“But what do they mean?”

“Just ‘figgers’,” he’d say, continuing his calculations.

When he finished at the table, he went into the family room with his paper bag or shoebox of “figgers.” He called either a woman named Cathy or his friend, Fiorentino, (a name you couldn’t make up) and spoke what sounded like code into the phone.

“Hey Fior,” his nickname for Fiorentino, “INT-175, FDV-150, ZJH-333.” And so the one-sided conversation went.

When he finished the phone call, he’d typically walk to the fireplace, empty the shoebox or paper bag of all its contents, and light everything on fire. I’d watch with him sometimes as he waited until the papers ignited. The fire didn’t last long and he’d spread the bits of paper around, making sure they were all dark dust.

***

Upstairs my sister Donna was on her bed. She was a senior in high school and president of her sorority, and always had an air of superiority. She shot me an annoyed look as I rushed in.

“The cops are here. Dad’s under arrest!” I blurted.

Donna shot up like a rocket as my sister Elaine, only a year older than I and the one to whom I was closest, rushed into the room.

“It’s that thing he’s been doing,” Donna said.

“What is that thing he’s been doing? I asked.

“You know, those papers.”

“But what are those papers?”

Whether my sisters knew or not, I couldn’t tell. They didn’t answer. But whatever it was my father was doing, even though we knew deep down it was not totally above board, we were going to hide from the men downstairs. Donna went into combat mode.

“Let’s go into Mom and Dad’s room. Search the drawers. Anything you find, those bits of paper, stuff in your panties.”

Like a well-organized sports team, we made a game plan: to strike before the feds ascended the stairs. Time was of the essence and we had to be discrete.

Downstairs the feds kept my mother in close sight. They made sure she had no chance to stash away any convicting proof of my father’s guilt as they scoured through cupboards, drawers, and sofa cushions, unaware all the while that actual evidence tampering was happening one flight above them.

Donna took on my mother’s dresser, Elaine the smaller closet, and I the walk-in closet where many shoes boxes lay on the shelves. I dug through sports jacket after sports jacket, wanting to find something, anything, that would save my father from the wolves downstairs, but there was nothing except paper clips and loose change.

“I found something!” Elaine exclaimed.

Donna and I ran over to her. My heart pounded. Elaine’s hands shook as she held small pieces of yellow paper. Quickly unfolding them, we realized … it was a false alarm. They were store receipts from recent sales.

“Put ’em in your panties anyway—they could be code for something,” Donna ordered. Elaine obeyed.

I peeked out my parents’ bedroom door to see where the feds were. Only their legs and shoes were visible from the top of the stairs as their feet disappeared into the living room. Their next stop would be the second floor.

“They’re getting closer,” I whispered as I rushed back to the closet. I looked around for where to continue my search. The shoeboxes sat on the shelves as if screaming at me. Of course! I ripped open lid after lid as I eagerly expected to find the gold, the treasure, the Ark of the Covenant (though I didn’t actually know what the Ark of the Covenant was)! But instead of finding the evidence and saving my father, all that stared back at me were pairs of high heels, low heels, slip-ons, men’s dress shoes, and loafers. My excitement turned to frustration and all I wanted was for this to end, for the large men downstairs to go away, for my mother to continue making her sauce, and for me go back to folding the laundry and finish watching my hockey game!

The men’s voices downstairs were getting louder. They were now at the bottom of the stairs. I hurried to get the last box on the shelf, accidently knocking another off its ledge. Its contents spilled onto the floor. I froze. There, on the carpet in the middle of my parents’ walk-in closet, were what seemed like millions of little pieces of white paper with the all-too-familiar code on them and a small, dark notebook.

“I found them! I found the ‘figgers’!” I whispered straining not to shout.

My sisters rushed over. The three of us stared at the evidence the feds were coveting strewn over the floor. Now, Donna, Elaine, and I had to figure out what to do with it.

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The youth disconnection is part of a bigger issue: Merced has the highest rate of child poverty in the state—40 percent according to the U.S. census—and we also have more kids, proportionally, than most counties. In 2011, the year I graduated from Golden Valley High School, Forbes called my hometown America’s third most miserable city. Since then, I have been part of a group of young people who’ve been organizing to get more youth services in Merced—recreation, jobs, summer programs—but we have been stonewalled by local officials.

This frustrates me, because this is home. I am a 21-year-old Merced native, the youngest of five siblings, and have lived here my entire life. I have a job as an assistant at We’Ced Youth Media, a local program founded three years ago by New America Media with community support. I’ve always wanted to raise a family here, and with the birth of my son six months ago, now I have the chance to.

If you’re young and live in Merced, you can feel particularly disconnected on hot summer afternoons. Recreation and summer school options usually require money. All this leaves more time to do nothing but smoke pot or to sit on the couch playing video games until night, when it’s time to try to find a house party. Get a summer job? The adult unemployment rate in Merced is nearly 17 percent right now, and unemployment among people age 16-19 even higher. Basically, the only way to get a job around here is if you know someone who can plug you in somewhere.

Before the recession, Merced spent a lot of money on youth recreation, but over the last few years, much of that spending ended. The two town swimming pools closed, which made it a lot harder to cool off in the Valley’s hot summers. Three years ago I was part of a group of residents and teenagers who organized to get McNamara Park pool reopened. We won, but spending on youth is still down 60 percent.

Last year We’Ced organized a forum to ask city council candidates about youth issues. To prepare, we surveyed 500 young people in Merced to see what was important to them. They said their biggest needs were finding jobs and productive things to do. We joined with other youth groups to ask the city council to help expand an underfunded summer jobs program the Merced County Office of Education already has in place to cover jobs for more than 100 teenagers, and help the Boys & Girls Club extend their hours and reopen some of the youth drop-in centers they closed down. The total for both of these requests is about $413,000 out of a total city budget of $194 million.

Since then I have attended many council meetings, but I don’t feel that the members are listening to us. They aren’t going to allocate more funds to Parks and Rec for youth services and worse, will not acknowledge their responsibility as our elected officials to help develop the city’s young people. Oftentimes their body language shows their disinterest. They rarely respond to our testimonies or questions, and when they do their responses are usually rude, careless, or defensive.

In years past, council members brushed off our requests by telling us that we had to be involved from the beginning of the budget process in order to see results. This year we’ve done just that. But from the beginning of the budget process, our requests for transparency and dialogue were met with either opposition or indifference. To his credit, new council member Michael Belluomini has asked the city manager to look into the budget to find money for youth services But more than once—in public at council meetings—the city manager stubbornly pushed back at even the thought of going back into the budget. Even though the city has a significant budget surplus, the council has expanded the funding for youth recreation by only $35,000. The budget is scheduled to be finalized Monday night.

It’s also been very disappointing to see and hear council members, city staff, and the mayor try to turn our requests into a fight between city employees and young people. The council and city staff tell us that in order to fund youth services they would have to let city employees go. They are very focused on employees; when they talk about public safety, they start talking about hiring police. To me, investing in young people is part of public safety.

In a way, the city council members are the ones who are “disconnected” from the city’s future. The overwhelming majority of Merced’s young people are non-white, while all but one member of the council are middle- to upper-middle-class white men.

The struggle for recognition has changed those of us who got involved. In April we held a rally with 100 people. People are getting a sense of responsibility and leadership. Now we need to get some compromise from the city council.

I wish I could say that I see my future firmly in Merced, but I don’t. I want to stay in Merced. It’s my home and it’s all I know. I don’t want to raise my son anywhere else.

That said, if I hadn’t found my job at We’Ced, I would not still be in Merced. I recently re-enrolled at the local junior college and have hopes of being successful in school and beginning a career to better the future of my family. But I also have a back-up plan: leaving Merced.

The post Merced’s Kids Are Not All Right appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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