Medcalf: Edina ambush that left teen with brain injury is a wake-up call

Myka Hanson, who runs the Edina-based teen advocacy group Teen Forward, rises early each morning and thinks about the generation of young folks she aims to help.

“I got my [doctorate] in psychology and then opened up Team Forward really to address the gap,” she told me. “There are kids who don’t need therapy, but they’re in therapy and there are kids who just have what we would have considered in our generation to be a fairly normal stress load, but because of social media and all of the things around them, that stress load is unbearable to them and that’s not their fault.”

The former high school teacher, who created her organization to combine her passion for teaching with psychology and other tools to help our youth, had the same reaction I did to a recent startling incident in Edina.

When I read about a sea of young men who entered an Edina YMCA and allegedly assaulted a 16-year-old who now has a traumatic brain injury, I thought about Michael.

Because I remember when my neighborhood changed.

It was the late 1980s in Milwaukee. Our summers were pure. My homeboy Jordan and I would walk to the corner store and buy bubble gum and Jolly Ranchers once a week. We had dance contests on the sidewalk in front of my house. And the whole block would convene. On those breezy nights, the adults would talk over fences in their backyards as we ran through the street nearby.

But the gang culture in the city had slowly creeped into communities that had not previously known that level of violence. Ours was next.

My neighbor Michael was stocky and athletic. If “cool” had a brochure, he would have been on the cover.

And then, Michael was walking home from school one day when a group of boys robbed him of his Starter jacket and nearly killed him in a brutal attack. Michael was in a coma for months. He recovered but he was permanently damaged.

One impulsive, selfish decision by a group of teens had forever altered his life.

The boys allegedly involved in the YMCA attack in Edina — two have been charged and six have been arrested — do not know the joy of getting older. At my age, things hurt sometimes that did not hurt a decade ago. I have to stretch as long as my workouts. And the wrong meal can cancel any plans I had that day.

But I also have the luxury of perspective, both mine and that of my peers. And I have a long list of young men in my life who never got the chance to see this stage because they were either the victims or perpetrators of violent acts that robbed them of the most important finite commodity: time.

The boys involved in last month’s attack at the Edina YMCA — and more importantly, the 16-year-old victim — have lost more of it than they can understand right now. This has to change. To expect a community transformation without a community mindset, however, is misguided, Hanson said.

“I’m a big ‘it takes a village’ person,” she said. “People are doing the best they can, but to put everything on the parents assumes that the parents really are expected to have a much higher level of knowledge and capacity than anyone could have.”

Every day, I see a video on social media that shows a group of young people attacking another group of young people. Fighting while folks are filming has intensified these situations. We have a generation of young folks who fear that they’ll end up on a TikTok clip at the wrong end of a beatdown, so they fight. Because their young egos tell them to react.

It does not have to be that way.

Our young men need to know masculinity is not about throwing the first punch. It’s about knowing one punch can end lives, both theirs and someone else’s, so you have to think before you make that fateful choice.

You have to give yourself, and those around you, a chance to see another day. That’s humanity.

And I believe we have a responsibility to tell these young folks about a future they don’t yet understand.

Because a young man in Edina entered a YMCA last month and nearly lost his life. His safety and condition are the priorities. If we disregard this societal shift toward devastating violence among our young people, however, there will be more trauma ahead.

“The majority of people truly have the capacity to change, to reflect, but that needs to be guided,” Hanson said. “Teenagers are not just small adults. Their brains are not developed yet. They don’t have the capacity for foreshadowing consequences. And some kids, too, if you tell them you’re going to go to jail for the rest of your life if you do this, they don’t care because they don’t feel like they have a life yet. They haven’t seen their futures of a job, maybe a family, travel, kids and loving relationships.”

I hope the young victim from last month’s incident is granted the opportunity to enjoy those moments. And I hope the young men allegedly involved in the attack remember that they, too, have a right to grow old.