And the beat goes on

Here's the Amazon page

I admit I've had the blues all week. A lot of it is because of the ugly attack on Israel and the ensuing war. Much of it is because of The Girls, the novel by Emma Cline I recently finished. 

It's told from the perspective of a woman looking back on her teen years in the late 1960s and how she somehow, improbably and yet in a way, inevitably, ended up in a commune. Headed by a charismatic madman, a thwarted rock star, who managed to convince a band of middle-class white girls to commit one of the most infamous and bloody mass murders of a very bloody decade.

Obviously based on the Manson Family and the Sharon Tate murders, it's not really very violent. At least not in the conventional, literal sense. I found it terribly painful and exhausting emotionally because it reminded me of my own high school years. No, I was never seduced into a cult. Because we didn't have a cult nearby.

But I did feel completely lost during those years. It was Vietnam, Watergate and Patty Hearst. My parents' marriage and finances were unraveling and neither of them handled it well. The adult world seemed malignant and corrupt. My classmates were into pep clubs and making floats while everything around us was spinning down into the abyss. I felt like a fraud when I pretended to care about those things. Oh yeah, and to make matters worse, there was disco.

When I mentioned in last week's Saturday 9 that I was miserable in high school, a well-meaning but presumptuous commenter assumed I'd been bullied. That might have been simpler and easier to recover from. No, I had friends. I was not bullied. I was just deeply disillusioned, lonely and isolated.

Watching the world now, I worry about today's 16-year-old girls. As I could not fathom my church-going dad's full-throated support of Nixon, they must look at the hypocrisy of their Christian parents wearing MAGA hats and find them deplorable. How can they trust an adult world that values the rights of gun owners over their own safety, offering them nothing more than "thoughts and prayers" as comfort after school shooting after school shooting? Or mocks environmental activism and blissfully leaves the next generation with a planet in peril?

I have to stop now. Remembering the teenage me just makes me ache too much for this new generation of girls.