Letters

It was discovered last week that 11 upper-class members of a high school lacrosse team near Syracuse had terrorized their younger teammates. They invited five of them out for some fast food and then staged a kidnapping. Four escaped, but one was thrown into the trunk of a car, with a pillowcase over his head, and later dumped in the middle of the woods. The young victims were terrorized and terrified.

The incident was videotaped.

Surprising? Horrifying? Really? As a psychologist, let me remind you what our children are surrounded by every day:

• The cruel and inhumane treatment of immigrants by ICE, including the denial of their basic rights

• The promotion and pleasure taken by Kristi Noem, the head of Homeland Security, in displaying half-naked men in a cages in El Salvador.

• The cruelty of the U.S. president expressed in deeds and language daily.

• The humiliation of the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office by the U.S. vice president.

• The unregulated elevation of the “manosphere” and misogynistic language in public culture, podcasts and on the internet.

• The cruelty and abuse of civilians in Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine and the Congo displayed in the news regularly, while our government is mostly mute.

Those are the obvious examples. Simply put, we are becoming a culture of cruelty, and it should be no surprise that the consequences are being expressed by our children.

Paula Angelone, Ph.D.

Southampton