In The Dark

What's the matter with kids these days? Since it's been nearly sixty years since that musical question was first offered up for our consideration and still longer since someone first uttered it without musical accompaniment, it probably bears attention. In this version, I am keeping in mind that all of us were kids at one time or another. Some of us more recently. Some of us with more frequency. Still, when we find someone acting like a ten-year-old, it's nice when the chronological age matches the behavior. 

And then there's this: fourteen-year-old Lily Marie Hartwell set fire to her family's home in Florida. She wasn't playing with matches, which would have skewed a little younger, behavior-wise. Instead, she was consorting with Slender Man. Her mother and nine-year-old brother escaped, thanks to a smoke alarm warning them of big sister's nastiness. What's that? You're not familiar with Slender Man? Who is this shadowy figure who commands allegiance and has recently been implicated in the attempted murder of a twelve-year-old girl who was stabbed by her "friends" in Waukesha,  Wisconsin. He is the embodiment of evil, or an Internet meme, depending on your point of view. Or age. 

It's also not the first, or surely not the last, time that kids have gotten hold of some snippet of pop culture evil and run with it. This time it's not Marilyn Manson or Judas Priest. Slender Man is more video game than rock and roll, but he reminds me most of Bloody Mary. You don't remember Bloody Mary? She was the spirit that was supposed to emerge from bathroom mirrors after elementary school bathrooms were crowded with terrified girls chanted her name. And she was supposed to kill them. Or show them the face of the man they were supposed to marry. It was messing around with the occult and things dark, in order to stir that pot of scary that exists in all of us. Especially when we're young.

It would be easy to blame Al Gore and his Internet for this one. It's really the best way to spread bad information, right up there with Fox News. It would be just as easy to put up big, blinking signs on sites frequented by pre-teen girls reminding them that Slender Man and his ilk are fun to play around with, but it's still play. It's not real. Burning down your house is very real. Stabbing your friend likewise. When you're twelve you don't always think of permanence, which is terribly sad, since these girls will all be dealing with the fallout of these incidents for the rest of their lives, now that their youth has been taken away. It's not the Internet. It's for real.