My second blog of 2018. I’m on a roll now. Don’t hold your breath, it may be my last. 

For those interested I’m listening to Lord Huron’s album Mighty as I write this. I feel a bit of shame for admitting how I first came across them, but here it is nonetheless. I first learned of them while watching the first season of the controversial 13 Reasons Why Netflix show, and their song The Night We Met was prominently  featured in it. I didn’t like the show or the even the song that much, but I wanted to know more about the band and I ended up enjoying their Strange Trails album on the whole. Since then I watched their NPR tiny desk concert and have listened to their older stuff from time to time to see if I enjoy it. I think it’s OK. 

While discussing video games with my students the nature of rites of passage came up. Video games are huge anywhere internet technology is, and in South Korea, which boasts some of the fastest internet speeds in the world and a massive professional and recreational gaming culture, they are big deal. Another thing about much of the developed and developing world is that many local traditions are fading out and giving way to more transient lifestyles, global networks, and the quest for upward mobility. On a bit of a side note, I thought senator Ben Sasse’s conversation with Stephen Colbert about this kind of thing in a recent interview was really well put. My students and I discussed the fact that for many youth, especially the lads, video games are replacing the identity formation mechanisms that were well established in their culture since ancient times. 

I reflected with them on my own formation into adulthood and realized how many markers there were for me along the way. As a southerner I was given a gun by age 8, and taught hunt shortly after I had learned to ride a bike without training wheels. By the time I was 16 I was deer hunting alone, driving, and speaking in front of modest sized crowds at church. I was also working during summers and many weekends. I say none of this to brag, I actually don’t think about it that often except when I want to get my West Coast friends to laugh about my redneck roots. I’m also in favor of stricter gun laws, for anyone wondering, especially regarding assault rifles. I’d like to think of myself as political hybrid of moderate redneck and moderate city dweller. I’m mostly appalled when I read news by just about everything. But in the context of this conversation I reflected on the portion of my life that was pre-internet and pre-cellphone and realized that for all its faults my local, rural, country life was filled with meaning and markers for identity formation into adulthood. Some of it was cultural, some spiritual. It wasn’t perfect, but as I survey my students and many regions of the world I come in contact with I realized that I had something I simply see missing today, especially with my students. There’s a family decay, a community decay, a relational decay, and don’t get me started on the spiritual decay. I don’t have the energy left in my day to process that with you now.

With my students there is a craving to know when one has traversed childhood into adulthood, from boyhood into manhood, girlhood into womanhood, something beyond they studied their eyes bloody and took a big test. Right now many of them are turning to games which have missions and teamwork and levels and markers for development. I wonder how families, churches and schools can recover what was lost, or adapt to something improved in order to more holistically form students and society into something other than depersonalized pieces on a market gaming board. 

That’s all I got for now, I’m tapped. I wish you well, dear reader.