Pamela, Just to respond: It's not just the music. It's the entire culture in which the music is just one part. There's the entire philosophy of death that surrounds emo. The poetry, the music, the fashion, the embracing of death and self injury is just a part of the over all subculture that is "emo." This is what I commonly see in my practice: Kids get to middle school age. They're looking for someway to identify and define themselves, that's what teens do. Some are attracted to "emo". Some of these kids may have some depression or other issues that make them susceptible to this. Other kids seem perfectly "normal" (another term I tend to hate), and then suddenly change. At any rate, these kids get into the music, and get the messages, they go online and see websites, and get the messages, they read the messages in all forms of media, they get together with their friends, and get the messages. They immerse themselves in a subculture that openly discusses, and sanctions/approves of self injury. When anyone immerses themselves in a culture, they begin to identify with and adopt the views and behaviors of that subculture. I visited a lot of web pages and forums when investigating this (and I was smart enough to identify the joke ones!). I have watched a few kids go from good grades, good friends, and good families, to being in the local psychiatric hospital with cuts up and down their arms. The only factor in their history is that they started hanging out with the local "emo" crowd. It's clearly the worst "social contagion" that I have ever seen. In addition to the negative and self destructive messages that kids get from "emo," there is a movement against Christianity in our society. So, essentially, kids are hearing all sorts of hopelessness and death, and their access to the Gospel is limited. I see this as an overall part of the decline of our culture. As for the pressures on teens, I probably said that too. My parents were baby boomers, I was generation X. My parents talked about Vietnam, and their friends being drafted and dying in a rice patty. I grew up during an arms race between the US and the USSR. We still had air raid drills in elementary school (because we all knew that crouching under school desks protects us from the effects of nuclear weapons-LOL). I lived in SW PA, which was at that time a major industrial center. We knew that if a nuclear war broke out, the USSR would saturate the area with multiple warheads. We lived daily under the threat that the next thing we saw would be a bright flash and then nothing. I'm not saying that one was any worse than the other. Different times, different stresses, different circumstances, and we all thought that we had it worse than the others, because that was what we lived. Every generation has thought that the previous one had unreasonable expectations. The key thing here is that no matter what man does, no matter what the historical circumstances, God is here (then, now and forever), and He does not change.
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