Boys

I LOVE BOYS, but they’re hard to love. This morning I read of a college fraternity that accidentally killed a new member by forcing him to drink gallons of vodka. There you have it, an example of foolish, cruel thoughtlessness that we find so awful in boys. We schoolteachers used to wish for a place to keep them till they grew to act like sane people.

Boys populate my thoughts lately, like bits of light: so funny, so needy, so bright, so full of energy, so smartass. They appear to me when I read of incidents like that fraternity death, or news of young soldiers killed, or accounts of boys who attack or persecute those different from the norm. They are a complex cohort in our communities.

When I was a young teen I fell in love with boys many times. That was a gift of hormones, of course, but it was an infatuation that never left me, even when I learn of boys’ stupidity and cruelty. In the company of young boys I’m entertained, amazed and charmed.

I can remember so many special boys. One stood at the back of the classroom and accidentally tied himself up in the window cords. Another shot a police officer. Another arrived at my door after his family had kicked him out. Another wrote beautiful poetry. Once a boy left my class on the last day with these words: “Ha ha. I copied that book report from my friend’s college class.” Boys could outsmart me like that, but they also wore an innocence I never saw in girls.

The script of the TV series Friday Night Lights captured the bonding between boys on a team, the need they have for the leadership of a compassionate coach, and the struggles they face growing into decent human beings. We thought it an excellent series and one of our favorite shows. Somehow the writers understood teen boys and were able to tell their stories.

I’m horrified by news of suicide bombers, mostly boys, who die for their beliefs in God and country. Their innocence leaves them vulnerable, and they are deluded and manipulated into an early death by those who exploit their anxieties and dreams. They cling to an understanding of an afterlife where there is the freedom to have sex with girls who wait on them. So much for my enjoyment of their antics in the classroom.

A novel about a homosexual boy, Shuggie Bain, and his struggles with loneliness, poverty and the lack of a caring adult is a powerful account of a boy’s inner life. Shuggie is a boy we can love, but his life is one of suffering. I can’t recommend this story to you. It’s too sad, too real. But such excellent writing can bring us to understand a human being who deserves our attention. He lives in my psyche.

Mostly we turn away from the volatile, uncontrolled and inchoate boy-child, like those who roam in gangs. Yet it seems to me that boys need special attention, settings that teach them how to be civilized, how to treat people unlike themselves, how to understand their own impulses; how to value their environment and learn from it.

I read this week a disturbing article about camps where boys can go to become more masculine, tougher and stronger. Unlike Scout camps, in these training camps boys endure the rigors of a military boot camp, and if they survive they can be ‘warriors,’ toughened into heroic fighters. The camp leaders sound like the men who recruit suicide bombers.

“We should fund a national service program,” Frank Bruni writes in The Age of Grievance, “giving people of different backgrounds familiarity with one another in the context of a shared mission. That service might be the upkeep of public parks, interventions with underprivileged children, visits to isolated elderly people . . .. It might hold the promise of long-term jobs.”

I read in our local daily paper of the Ancestral Lands Conservation Project that engages Native youth in projects to benefit our forests. One of the boys reported, “This is the first time I felt accepted . . .. This program saved my life.”

I knew a shy, gifted boy in college who graduated from an unusual remote high school in the desert. His high school was a marvel of preparation, and I don’t think he’d have survived college without it. He came to college prepared for the realities of girls, pranks, inept teachers and unsupervised dorm life.

All youngsters are works in progress, of course, but I think it is the boy who most needs the guidance of a community in which he becomes a man we can admire and love.

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