Voices Worth Hearing
A Frodo's Notebook Staff Editorial
by Mark Tebben - Director of Business and Finance

I’m starting this editorial at 1:45 AM on a Saturday night, in a bar, on the back of a receipt. It’s my friend Tom’s 21st birthday, and my friends have decided to take him out for this night on the town. So we’ve come to this bar in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’m not sure why—I have to shout at his ear to tell him “Happy Birthday,” and I can’t hear what he’s saying in return—but this is actually one of the coolest, most popular places in the area; the Place to Be on a Saturday night. So as I’m writing this, I am arguably one of the coolest people in West Michigan.

But not only am I at this cool bar, I’m “upstairs.” I stood in a line for a half-hour to pay a guy three dollars to let me walk up a flight of stairs. Which makes me even cooler. Because the second floor of this bar is the Place To Be at the Place to Be. Up here is the dance floor and the DJ, a bigger bar, and a whole lot more people. I’m sure places like this are familiar to a lot of you. There’s a big, hot, crowded room, dance floor in the center, tables and stools around the edges. The tables and stools are dimly lit, but on the dance floor flashes a blinding and seizure-inducing display of lights and lasers, illuminating the herd of dancers moving side to side, up and down against whomever they happen to be next to, more or less in time with the deafening music being pumped above and below and through it all. It’s a tornado of track lighting, tank tops, and techno music.

Oh man, the noise must be getting to me—I’ve sacrificed accuracy for alliteration. It’s not a tornado, it’s a hurricane, because the center of a hurricane is dead.

I’ve isolated myself at a back corner table to write this all down. As I made my way back here, some guy who I’ve never met before and will never see again greeted me with all the enthusiasm of a pastor of a dying congregation greeting his first visitor in weeks. He called me “bro” and meant it, asking me if I was having a good time. At least that’s what I thought he said—I couldn’t really hear his voice. Of course I lied and said I was, returned his smile with a fraction of his enthusiasm, and turned away to sit down. But as I started writing, I started thinking about why he and I are among the coolest people in town tonight; why crowds of young people fill this place night after night to get drunk and deafened and dry-humped by strangers. What are we looking for here? Good drinks? Yes, and no. Good music? Yes, and no. A body to get close to? Yes. And no.

The minimum age to get into this particular place is 21, which means that none of the people here—at least those who entered legally—are eligible to submit to Frodo’s Notebook. But they were not so long ago, and there are thousands of places like this across the United States and the world without this age requirement, where it’s certainly conceivable that I could run into Kristen Cox, or Ben Carr, or Monica Rana, or any number of our writers. And the thing I’m realizing about these places—the ridiculous contradiction about these places - is that while everything seems like it’s designed to bring people together, it’s really doing everything it can to stop any kind of real human interaction. I don’t mean physical interaction—they’re all about that—but any genuine connection between not just bodies, but actual people. There’s no real giving and receiving from each other here, no “encounter of souls.” And there’s certainly nothing like the stories in the Old Testament where Jacob, Samuel, and any number of others realize who they really are as people only by coming before God and others and saying, “Here I am.” Instead, there is a whole culture where Monica is only worth the 15 dollars a guy spends on drinks for her, and Ben is only worth the scraps of paper he’s got phone numbers written down on.

Young people today need places where their voices can be heard. Unfortunately, places like this bar are the norm for today’s young adults, even in a very broad sense. Not only at these types of social gatherings, but also in the media, advertising, and a lot of youth culture in general, we are told implicitly and explicitly to shut up. But that is the last thing we should be doing.

Daniel’s editorial last issue was in praise of art conceived in moral struggle. There’s a lot to be said for that, but there’s also a lot to be said about art conceived after the struggle, when you’ve figured something out, when you’ve grasped a truth, when you’ve discovered a little more about who you are. And there’s definitely a lot to be said about art conceived during and as a means to the transition between the two. That’s one of the main reasons we do what we do here. It’s so extremely important for young people to be able to say “Here I am” to the world without being drowned out by music or alcohol or anything else, because through that we learn, grow, and come to truth. Yours are voices worth hearing and necessary words. Don’t ever let them be silenced.

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