Drama…

… is not what it used to be.

I can’t remember, for sure, when I first heard the word “drama” used with negative connotations. I think it was probably around 6 years ago…

You wouldn’t think that significantly changing the meaning of the word drama would have any real impact on my life, but it did. Suddenly, when I wanted someone to participate in a role playing type thing, I had to ask them if they wanted to do some acting. It just didn’t sound as good, but if I asked them if they wanted to get involved in drama, they kind of looked at me like I’d grown a second head. Thankfully, Mrs. Darbis (from High School Musical) eventually supplied us with the word, “theater”… and that sounded a little bit better… sort of…

When I was in Jr. High (and… uh… maybe early High School, too…), I remember having “drama”. We didn’t call it that, but it existed. I do specifically remember the words, “drama queen”… so I guess the concept was there. Let’s not have anybody guessing who the drama queen was, OK…

At any rate, kids had drama, even then… back in the stone ages…

It usually had to do with the boyfriend of the month… or the popular kids thinking they were all that (and a bag of chips)… or your best friend stealing your boyfriend of the month… or your best friend becoming one of the popular kids and leaving you behind.

Drama was about who you would dance with when the slow music played and how you would balance your birthday party list so there would be the same number of girls and guys (which there never was). It was about having somebody to sit with on the bus until they were all old enough to drive and you still weren’t. Then it was about begging your dad to drive you to school so your friends wouldn’t see you actually getting off “the cheese”…

As I got older, it became about making a 4.0 the last semester of high school in order to graduate with honors (just barely) and convincing other kids that it wasn’t so incredibly beyond the realm of possibility that someone would choose to get married at 17 without being pregnant (or even ever having had sex).

It was about crying over not being the #1 Bible quizzer… again… or not receiving a scholar’s endorsed diploma because you missed the fine print about having to take a 4th year of science.

That was kind of my experience, anyway.

But the thing about drama is that it’s supposed to be a façade. And drama isn’t a façade anymore.

Now, to be fair, let me explain that this post is coming out of my thoughts about something very serious that happened in my town last night. I was at home with my kids (kind of a rare occurrence for a Friday night), and after they were all asleep I decided to take a quick look at facebook before I turned in for the night, too (kind of a regular occurrence every night). I expected to see my usual fare… cute updates from friends about their kids… baseball news… amusement park news… a couple of posts about what somebody had for dinner… and some teen drama thrown into the mix. For the most part, that’s exactly what I found… except for one post that caught my attention and had something to do with a shooting.

To be completely honest, it took me a couple of seconds to grasp the reality of it. At first I thought it was a new application I needed to block… or a joke… or something. As a photographer, I actually had to think for a moment about whether the post insinuated that pictures were being shot… or guns. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that it was the latter.

I quickly sent a message to one of the teenagers I know who was on and within minutes had information in front of me about 4 teenagers (the news today says 5) who were shot near our bowling alley. I looked at the time and realized it was 10:12… just minutes after Phil should have sent the last teenagers home from the firehouse for the night. I ran upstairs to grab my phone. Upon opening my phone, I kicked myself for not having it on me, because a message had been left at 9:40. It was a staff member from another area youth hang out, calling to inform me of what I already knew. I hung up and called Phil… 10:13. He knew absolutely nothing about this and had, indeed, sent kids out to walk home within fifteen minutes. (Here I will digress for just a minute and say that it seems to me that in the case of a teenage shooting… with shooters at large… it would make sense for law enforcement to contact any places in which teenagers are known to hang out en masse. I understand that it would not be the #1 priority, but it ought to fall somewhere on the list.)

Of course, all of this set Phil into motion, calling the parents of the last kids who had left, getting the building completely shut down, and driving through the streets just to make sure none of “our” kids were still out. Mercifully, it started to rain, so there weren’t too many people on the streets.

As of this morning, the latest news article is listing one teenager in intensive care and all of them in stable condition. I cannot actually confirm the accuracy of this, but it is the best source I currently have.

What has affected me most, though, is the single word that keeps coming up in regard to this incident…

Drama…

As I continued to follow facebook feeds, kid after kid (and these are kids, let’s have no doubt about it) wrote about the drama… the fighting… and I just started to feel sort of numb to it.

I want to get in these kids’ faces and just shake them sometimes, proclaiming, “Drama is not real life!” What these teenagers experienced last night was not drama. What they experienced was real.

Now… I have no doubt that it very well may have started with drama. In fact, it might have started with drama much like I described from a 7th grade perspective. But at some point, this escalated. And I see a lot of that. It doesn’t generally escalate to a shooting, but it does escalate far beyond what teenage drama ever should…

I know kids who thrive on drama. They are not happy unless they are unhappy, and they tend to try to take everyone else with them. In fact, I have watched a few teenagers already “cashing in” on the adrenaline rush that this event is producing. They are going to be the ones who know everyone who was involved and create all the details to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, these kinds of kids almost never actually know what happened. It’s just yet another ploy to draw drama and attention to themselves (another reason why I am carefully selecting which kids’ pages I draw my information from and which ones I engage in conversation about this with).

And with that… if any teenagers are reading this today… let me caution you to be careful where you get your facts. To me, it seems like a very sick thing to try to capitalize on this, but there are kids out there who are going to try to be the heroes in this situation. Somehow, they will inflate the story beyond what it even is and look for a way to use this event to catapult themselves into the inner circle of popularity…

Seriously? Do we really need to inflate this story? I think it’s big enough, don’t you?

Let’s keep those who were involved in our prayers. And if the remote possibility even exists that an event such as this could cause us to re-evaluate the pressures and expectations we put on our teenagers, let’s do that, too. It is not as easy to be a kid today as it was when I was a kid (and that’s really not a million years ago… more like a dozen). I feel like teenagers are forced to grow up too soon now, and consequently they are dealing with issues that no one should have to deal with. As a side not, I also fee that teenagers are staying immature longer, and I think that is directly related, as well, to the inappropriate responsibilities we thrust upon them rather than the appropriate ones we let go. This is a post for another time, however.

For today, let’s be thankful for our families and pray for peace in our community.

Lisa