In a story that just won’t go away, 24-year-old Benjamin Stibbe of Grafton was convicted of, and sentenced to, almost 20 years in jail for his role in a heroin ring that sold the drugs to Ozaukee county residents.
Among other things, Stibbe’s actions led to the deaths of four people, including two young adults, one being a 17-year-old from Cedarburg.
For many, these deaths served as a wake up call that moving to affluent north shore suburbs might insulate our youth from the problems (read: illegal drug use) that afflict the depressed urban areas of our country.
Debbie Kobiske, the mother of a young victim, said she was grateful that the police were able to arrest one “higher-up” from Chicago and charge another last week.
I wish that I, too, could be so comforted by these arrests, but I am not. We should not deceive ourselves: Like everything else, the world of illicit drug sales is subject to the “invisible hand” of the free market economy. Someone else will shortly take the place of these parasites. Selling drugs is just too lucrative.
As I read in horror that Stibbe’s 49-year-old mother, Teri, was also charged, something came to mind: There is a difference between lost souls and kids who have lost their way.
As I near my 50th birthday, and after hundreds of hours listening to clients reveal themselves as they tell their stories, I am aware that I am losing my naïve optimism about people’s ability to change long standing personality characteristics.
Young Mr. Stibbe, and any mother who would knowingly place her own child in harm’s way are, in my opinion, lost souls.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Benjamin began using drugs and alcohol at an age when most kids still watch cartoons and sleep with stuffed animals. He has seen the inside of more court rooms than a colleague of mine who works as a forensic psychologist.
While I am willing to believe that the tears shed by this sad young man as he faced the families of those who died as a result of his drug sales were genuine, the time to consider the consequences of his actions was before, and not after the “roll of the dice.”
Green Bay massacre averted
Contrast the above with another recent story that unfortunately brought the wrong kind of national attention to “title town” USA. A story about young men who, while not lost souls, have clearly veered well off-course.
Two 17-year-olds from Green Bay were arrested late last month for planning a “Columbine-like” massacre at Green Bay East High School. Early reports indicate that similar to what happened in Colorado, these young “misfits” were teased or bullied for not looking, acting or talking like other kids who belong to a well-defined peer group.
The similarities between Columbine and Green Bay at this stage in the investigation are eerie. How these kids were able to accumulate the vast array of armaments is beyond the scope of this piece (but I do hope someone addresses this).
However, what merits discussion is the one major difference between these two recent events — one was stopped before tragedy and the other ended only after senseless drug overdoses.
Today, dozens of children are in school in Green Bay, going about the business of their education, playing and hopefully developing life skills. They are there only because some yet-to-be-identified student had the courage and good sense to step forward and prevent a tragic disaster. That young person knew the difference between a good secret and a bad one and recognized that not all loyalty is noble.
I know that the list of parents who are thankful must be quite large. Not just parents of the potential victims, but also the parents of the alleged perpetrators, one of whom remarked that she was grateful her son was in jail and not a coffin.
Listening to the parents of the accused reminds me of how powerless and out of touch with their children parents often feel.
Unlike Ben Stibbe, who had numerous run-ins with law enforcement authorities, the Green Bay teenagers have no record of trouble except for apparent learning disabilities.
According to one boy’s mother, those disabilities were used to bully and harass her son.
What is clear to me is that children on the North Shore or in Green Bay, now more than ever, need help in developing critical thinking skills that will help them become better problem solvers. Skills that may one day help save someone’s life, perhaps even their own.
While schools are in the business of educating and inspiring students, parents still have an important, key and central role in this process. For this growth to occur, parents must have more than a superficial awareness of what is occurring in their children’s lives and minds.
They need to help their children develop critical social and emotional skills that they can use to successfully navigate the challenges that lie ahead. Doing so not only makes practical sense, it is also something that our religion directs us to do: “Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
In the Jewish community, our children are as at-risk as any other population. As parents, we cannot believe that our children are immune to the challenges and pressures that go hand-in-hand with adolescence.
We must not bury our heads in the sand, but make ourselves aware of the risks and issues. In addition, we must open a dialogue and educate our children, give them the confidence to make wise and thoughtful decisions.
Hirsh Larkey, Psy.D., is director of psychological services at Jewish Family Services, which runs the Six Critical Conversations Project. JFS will host psychologist and author Myrna Shure, Ph.D., on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 7:00 p.m., at the Radisson North Shore for a talk titled “Raising a Thinking Child.”
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