The End of Youthful Creative Expression

When I was in 10th grade, I wrote in my Honors English journal that I was depressed, angry and often thought of killing myself due to my situation at home. My father seemed miserable at his job and in my mind he appeared to be taking it out on me. He wasn’t vicious or abusive luckily, just unpleasant to be around. I felt like I couldn’t make him happy no matter what I did and that made me think I’d be better off dead.

My mother always came home angry from her job at my families chocolate confections store. Though we get along much better today, I can remember very distinctly the feeling of dread whenever she thundered through the door in the early afternoons of my teenage years.

Having been a fat kid for most of my adolescence, on top of being a white boy in a black neighborhood (as the song goes) first, then a white boy in a white neighborhood who talked like a black kid when I moved at age 12, I was picked on for almost as long as I can remember. So I was miserable at school because I was frequently teased, miserable at home because I got to feeling that my parents hated me and life in general, and so in response I wrote in my journal that I wished I was dead. I thought about killing myself to spare my parents any more misery in their life.

When my English teacher, a fairly tolerant woman, read what I had written she called my parents and warned them about my suicidal ideations. My dear ole pappy responded, “My son is not stupid enough to kill himself.”

That one statement probably changed my life. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and furthermore, just stopped trying to live for the approval of my parents. A few years later I would have my revenge by singing Rage Against the Machines “Killing in the Name Of” at my senior year rock show in front of all the school board administrators, my extended family and the PTA. If you are at all familiar with that song, you can imagine just how mortified they were every time I screamed, “Fuck you won’t do what you tell me!”

Written expressions of suicide were not my only creative outlet. I once wrote a poem comparing the neutron bomb to a chicken with its head cut off. The guitarist in my band and I made up a satire of the 2000 Year Old Man comedy sketch, called, “Interview with a Brain on Acid.” Another Mark Radulich original poem compared all of the deaths in the name of God and religion to the victims of the Holocaust in which I asked, “Is Hitler God?”

All of these works were summarily banned from the high school magazine despite the efforts of the student staff that lobbied on my behalf for their inclusion. By the time I graduated I was somewhat of a legend in that I was known for constantly flouting Plainedge High Schools practiced norms.


Was I your typical snotty suburban liberal? Absolutely. Did my teachers think I was a bit of a nut? Sure. But this was before the 1999 Columbine school shootings. This was before the usual creative expressions of teenage angst and alienation became fodder for an almost fascist repression by adults too lazy to bother understanding their children. Looking back on how my parents and teachers handled me from the years 1990 – 1994, I consider myself to be blessed.

However, David Riehm lives in the post-Columbine era and therefore his creative writing is subject to psychological analysis.

According to a story reported by Court TV, a 17-year-old Minnesota high school student, David Riehm was committed to an adult psychiatric ward after submitting two questionable pieces of creative writing. One was a, “satirical fable [that] concerned a boy who awoke from a wet dream, slipped rear-end first onto a toy cone, and then had his head crushed "in a misty red explosion" under the tires of a school bus.”

This first piece only worried his teacher and she expressed this caution in the form of criticism and a desire for him to make changes in his life. He answered her by writing another story titled, “Bowling for Cuntcheson,” a vivid dream-within-a-dream about a boy who finds a gun under a church pew and shoots his teacher, "Mrs. Cuntcheson." Obviously, with memories of a dozen or more school shootings since 1999, this teacher, a Ms. Ann Mershon, immediately acted on her authority as a mandated reported.

This action resulted in, “David [being] suspended on Jan. 24, 2005. The next night, three men — a Cook County deputy sheriff, a state trooper and a social worker — showed up at Colleen Riehm's home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation with a court order to seize her son and commit him to a psychiatric ward 150 miles away in Duluth. (David's stepfather is Native American, but David is not enrolled in any tribe.)

With no room at the juvenile facility, David was temporarily placed in the adult unit.

"He was scared to death," David's attorney told Courttv.com. "He didn't know what was going to happen from one minute to the next."

A physician later determined David was neither mentally ill nor dangerous, and more than 100 letters of support, written by classmates, faculty and parents, were presented at a court hearing, his attorney said.

David was ordered released from the hospital 72 hours after he had been taken into custody. His mother received $6,000 in medical bills.

It’s no wonder many kids today just give up and give in to drugs. Obviously it doesn’t make it right but it would be hard for me not to understand where many of them are coming from. The gap of understanding between adults and children is widening more everyday as both side stick fingers in their ears and scream, “La la la la, I’m not listening.” It’s sad really. It saddens me that in the 12 short years since I graduated from high school the notion of children as being a mild but nurtured nuisance seems to have devolved into regarding children as mass murdering pariahs.

I never thought I’d say this but thank God for the ACLU. It’s not fair to judge every child, especially with all the subversive influences out there, by the same measuring stick as the kids who were obviously ill and rampaged through their schools. Had I been born 10 years later, who knows how my parents would have reacted to the childish antics of my youth.

Though they weren’t always pleased with my choices, more often than not they supported me in my creative endeavors instead of opting to drug me and ship me off to a program. In the case of the teachers, it’s one thing to be concerned, as I’m sure she had a right to be, but we can’t over react every time a kid writes a nasty story. What is the message that sends? Only the most innocuous and uninteresting stuff is worthy of consideration in today’s school, lest someone help himself or herself to their grandfather’s arsenal?

Maybe a better plan would be for adults to start talking to their children again, parents and teachers alike before an entire generation of kids is lost to an endless stream of drugs, therapy and malaise.