Innocence - Maybe it's just

Innocence - Maybe it's just my normal dyspepsia returning after a really nice weekend.

Maybe it's my 40-year-old brain looking at 21-year-old college kids and feeling like I'm looking down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Maybe it's my inner history nerd and my internal social critic getting together, splitting a twelve-pack of James Page, listening to The Alarm and leaping to their feet looking for some butt to kick.

But I'm not quite sure how to react to this piece in today's Strib, about the young composer from St. Olaf College whose first major work, "Christine's Lullaby", received its debut performance at the Minnesota Youth Symphonies concert at Orchestra Hall today.

The piece - an elegy to the youngest victim of 9/11, Christine Hansen of Groton, Connecticut - has been getting great reviews. Lileks was there, and he loved it. It's apparently good neoclassical music - something the world needs more of.

But the composer - Carl Schroeder - had this to say in the Strib article:

"It all became symbolic for me. Christine became a symbol of the senselessness of human violence. It seemed to me the story was being made so complicated -- about a clash of civilizations and about the event reshaping the world -- when what really happened on September 11 was the death of innocence, the loss of our innocent future," Schroeder said.

America "Losing Its Innocence" is one of those things, like "Madonna Changing Her Style" or "Africa A Mess", that every generation must have to discover for itself. Our innocence has been trashed at many times in our history: the Jackson Administration; The Kansas War; The Civil War; both World Wars, the Cold War, Vietnam; the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate; finally, 9/11. At each stage, the nattering classes and the wonks and the people who were never really taught history need to be reminded that, while each generation may have come into the world wet behind the ears, America as a whole is generally as innocent as a cashier at a peep show across from a navy base.

I'm a dad. When I see the outrages committed upon us, especially to our children, I don't see our nation "losing its innocence", like an eight-year-old hearing her parents fight over what the Easter Bunny's going to leave.

We're more like a guy lying on a beach chair with a beer, who sees his child is walking into traffic. We lose our sense of purposelessness.

Mr Schroeder continues:

He sifted through news of her family's story and found a Web site dedicated to the memory of Christine and her parents, packed with remembrances and condolences. Reading them, he said, "It felt like Christine had become a little more real."

Speaking for every father in the audience, I think this was real the moment we heard about it.

But I'll look forward to hearing the piece.

Posted by Mitch at May 5, 2003 06:30 AM