Sound Values Stand Up To Distractions

Jeff Burningham’s brain has been bashed regularly with the music of Pearl Jam. Classmate Brandon Enevold’s mind has been routinely invaded by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s violent movies. Jeff and Brandon are 18.

They live in the Spokane Valley.

All through high school, they have been swimming in the American pop culture that pounds out endless entertainment images based on sex, drugs and violence.

This beat recently prompted presidential aspirant Bob Dole to describe today’s music and movies as “nightmares of depravity,” poisoning the souls and minds of American young people.

Are Jeff and Brandon poisoned souls?

“Gee, I hope not,” Jeff said a few days after his graduation from University High School.

Although he could recite the words to Jeremy, Pearl Jam’s anthem to a nerd lost in school, Jeff Burningham doesn’t fit a stereotype of a lost teenager.

Jeff graduated as a valedictorian from University High with a 4.0 average. His close relationship with the music of Nirvana didn’t stop him from being elected student body president.

He lettered in football and basketball all three years. “And I still had time to go out with my friends to have some fun,” he said.

A similar story can be charted for Brandon Enevold.

His musical tastes run to Garth Brooks (who sings about a boy and a girl staying up all night in a pickup truck) and movies where big guns rule the world.

“Sure, some of it goes too far, but I guess the most important thing is for kids to know the difference between right and wrong before they go into the theater,” Brandon said.

“And while I don’t really like the gangster movies, with all the bad language and stuff, I guess I can see that if that’s the way life is in the big cities then the movie is just trying to show it.”

Brandon Enevold also pulled a 4.0 at University High School and shared the valedictorian stage. Besides perfect grades, he found time to win a power weightlifting competition and go bow hunting on weekends.

The stories of these 18-year-olds who managed to do well in school while listening to music and watching Hollywood movies suggest more thought needs to go into the relationship between popular culture and the disturbing attractions some young people have for drugs, sex and violence.

Surely the plague of teenage pregnancies, juvenile violence and below-average achievements presents troubling challenges to the nation’s future. We know we need to do something about these trends.

But what?

After listening to Jeff Burningham and Brandon Enevold talk about their lives, it seems clear they have been influenced by forces more powerful than pop movies and music. These young men found strength in their families.

They developed a youthful self-confidence based on their own sense of self. At a young age they focused on a point far beyond the next party or night out with their high school friends.

“I have a box in my closet I made in ninth grade,” Jeff Burningham recalled. “Four years ago I wrote on the sides my goals for sports, school, church and family. And I have tried to keep to those goals.”

The writing on the side of the box included such things as getting all A’s, doing his very best in sports, avoiding drugs and alcohol.

“As I went to high school I had to make a personal stand for these,” he said. “Instead of going out to a game, I sometimes had to stay home and do some calculus.”

“It was totally tough not to go out and party in my sophomore year. But once everyone knew that I wasn’t into partying, it was fine.”

Brandon Enevold described a similar, personal determination.

“I always got my homework done because I knew I wanted to get scholarships for college, ” he said.

“I would tell kids coming into high school that it’s not like you aren’t cool if you don’t party all weekend, ” he said. “It’s your own choice and I chose not to.”

Each of these valedictorians was molded early by a loving family that believed in them and set high standards.

That molding and standard-setting happened before either Jeff or Brandon had watched many movies or owned their own collections of music.

And, in their early adolescent years, when they moved into the world of pop culture and teenage peer pressure, each of these young men set personal goals and held to them.

Their road to success passed through the movie theater and by the record rack but these amusements didn’t lead them down a wrong path.

They already had a road map of where they wanted to go.

, DataTimes