What are we really afraid of?

We are a fellowship of the fearful: parents who send our children off to school, once upon a time assuming they’d be safe; now, praying they will be protected.

Theirs is the fraternity of disenfranchisement: boys who feel so powerless that they stuff their feelings down deep, into the black place in their heart where not even a flicker of reason can reach. We imagine a school building on TV, teenagers fleeing in terror from a classmate armed with a weapon capable of wiping out the world as they knew it. They imagine themselves on TV, finally getting the respect or the attention they feel they have been denied.

The question is this: Assuming there is to be no national epiphany on gun control -- and it seems no amount of school yard slaughter is sufficient to bring that about -- what can we as parents do to lessen our fear and, at the same time, provide nonviolent alternatives for severely troubled children?

Of course, there is the easy option: We focus all our attention on reminding our children to talk, to tell, to not keep secret the words of a friend or a fellow student who threatens to do harm to the school. This is not a small deed to perform -- in most cases of school violence, the child who has access to the guns says something to someone about getting revenge, or making people pay. We should be reminding our teenagers about coming forward with their suspicions as often as we used to remind them as grade school students not to go with strangers. By warning our children to be vigilant, we are making them safer. But is that really all we should be doing?

As the mother of a teenage son, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It’s not a coincidence that this brotherhood of school violence is an almost exclusively male club. If all the shooters were left-handed, you can bet we’d be trying to figure out what we as a society were doing to left-handed people that made them prone to this kind of violence. Yet we have accepted the "norm" that it’s adolescent boys who commit these school shootings as easily as we have accepted the "norm" that millions and millions of guns should be floating around, available to almost anyone who wants one.

No wonder we want metal detectors and police officers in the hallways. That’s a lot easier than trying to figure out what it is we’re doing to (or not doing for) boys that makes spraying a school library or lavatory with bullets an option for a tortured few of them.

What is that about? Are we afraid if we pay attention to the level of violence they are absorbing through television and games and movies and music -- afraid if we monitor it, limit it, talk to them about it, constantly -- that we will be emasculating them somehow? That it is their right as boys, as young men, to be fascinated by combat, by violence? Are we afraid that they will be less than whole if we encourage them as children to be kind, to be empathetic, to put another person’s feelings ahead of their own? Are we afraid they will be ostracized if we raise them to be the kind of kid who tells his friends to stop teasing the new boy in class? Are we afraid they will not grow up to be successful men if we encourage them, as little boys, to talk about what’s going on inside them? Are we afraid that, if they cry in sorrow or frustration, if they pound a pillow in rage or resentment, if they choke on the tears of humiliation or anxiety, that they will be too weak to cope with all that is expected of them as men in today’s world?

Is that what we’re afraid of?

Maybe what we should be afraid of is the fact that we have launched our sons off into the sea of adolescence aboard a boat with no life raft. Maybe we should be afraid that, when they start to sink, to flounder, to flail about, they have nothing to cling to, save the fact that they are men.

Maybe they need more than that.

Alicia Blaisdell-Bannon is the managing editor of the Cape Cod Times.

During her 19 years at the Times, she also has served as news editor, night news editor, lifestyles/home/food/health editor and copy editor. She has written a weekly humor column for 17 years. Her editing and writing awards include those from Investigative Reporters and Editors; the Associated Press; the Scripps Howard Foundation; the Goldsmith Awards at Harvard University; the University of Missouri’s Baccardi Award for Environmental Journalism; the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors; the Gerald Loeb Awards at UCLA; the Benjamin Fine Award for Educational Reporting; the New England Newspaper Association; and the New England Press Association.

Before coming to the Times, she worked as an editor for the Navy and as editor in chief of the weekly paper at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. She has also been a reporter for weekly papers in Minnesota, Maryland and Massachusetts.

She is a graduate of the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. She shares her home with two teenagers and a foolish collie named Bailey.