Rep. Don Young, students clash over suicide, marriage

WASILLA — When staff members for U.S. Rep. Don Young first approached Wasilla High School officials about a forum for government class students, officials were receptive.

After all, Young, 81, is the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives. He was first sworn into Congress during the waning years of the Nixon Administration. Forums with other elected officials at local schools had largely been positive, school system officials said.

However, what began as an opportunity for a front-row look into national politics ending with shouts, profanity, and hurt feelings on both sides.

In the following days, the political fracas has been picked up from Alaska news sites and reported by numerous national media outlets.

About 120 students attended the forum at Wasilla High Tuesday afternoon. Young made a 15-minute case to newly minted young voters about why they should vote for him, then opened the floor to questions.

Several students and teachers asked questions about current topics. Students and Young discussed the potential commercialization of marijuana, on the ballot this November.

When a teacher posed a question about suicide, Young implied that suicides resulted from a failure of community support networks in Alaska. The comment struck a nerve, in part because a student described as socially active at the school had committed suicide a few days before Young’s appearance.

After a brief silence, 17-year-old Hunter Hermans, a senior football player, called out from the stands. Hermans spoke about it later.

“He just started bleeping out that you should just go to the doctors and get prescribed against it and how it’s a weakness and it shows a lack of support and love,” he said. “Nobody would talk after that. I just shouted out ‘That’s false.’”

Young asked if Hermans had something to say, so Hermans kept talking.

“I said that the kid last week that just did it had plenty of love and plenty of support and you could see how hundreds of people in the community were just hurt by it,” he said.

A few students said they felt Young’s remarks blamed them for the loss of their friend Jeremiah Parret, and said the idea of suicide victims as socially isolated or without support groups clashed with their recent experience on the matter.

“This wasn’t true of Jeremiah at all,” said Dillon Shoenberg, who said he was among Parret’s friends, though he didn’t attend the forum with Young. “We knew he was in a bad place, but he had all the help he could get.”

Seniors Rebecca Barnes and Brian Palmer, who did attend the forum, said Young’s remarks were insensitive and surprising, given his social status.

“It really shocked me that a person of his power would say that,” Palmer said. “I was like ‘Why would you do that?’”

Young later commented candidly on his opinions on marriage equality, raising ire even among students, like Barnes, who agree with him on the issue, students said.

“I personally don’t agree with gay marriage, but I think the attitude he approached it with was kind of rude,” she said.

For other students, like Danika Ingersoll and Reagan Johnson — who support marriage equality — said a barnyard example Young used to tell students that pairings between same-sex animals don’t produce offspring, was offensive and inadvisable.

“Yes, he was asked his opinion, but to go so far into it to make comparisons between people and animals… it was kind of striking, I feel, for me personally. I feel like if you have something to say that is abrasive to a certain community, maybe it’s not the best idea to put it out there when you have such an impact,” Johnson said.

Young’s stance on marriage contradicted statements about equality made at the same forum, Johnson said.

“He said ‘I am for equal rights,’” she quoted Young as saying. “‘Marriage is not a possibility. It’s not a possibility for same sexes. It’s not.’”

That remark infuriated Hermans, too. His uncle Timothy Minnick Lewis is openly gay (Hermans proudly described him as “the gayest man in Alaska” Thursday). While the generation gap might explain Young’s tone, it doesn’t excuse it, Hermans said.

“The way I look at it is, it’s 2014 now, and everything changes and you gotta just get used to that, and you’ve got to change yourself with the community,” he said.

Then, as the forum was breaking up, Young cursed at Hermans directly.

“It makes me wonder how he talks to adults if this is how he treats a 17-year-old,” Hermans said.

Young had apologized to school officials, said spokesman Matthew Shuckerow in a written statement.

“Congressman Young did not mean to upset anyone with his well-intentioned message,” he wrote, in an email. “In light of the tragic events affecting the Wasilla High School community, he should have taken a much more sensitive approach.”

At a community appearance at the Pioneers Home Wednesday in Palmer, Young, a former Bureau of Indian Affairs school teacher, said he was upset by student behavior at the forum, as well as school officials’ response to that behavior, according to a recording provided by Young’s opposition, Forrest Dunbar.

On the recording, a constituent asked Young to elaborate on his remarks.

“Suicide is a mental illness, it’s not a disease,” Young said. “I was frustrated yesterday. There was three 18-year-olds sitting over there in the corner, interrupting other students when they asked questions, and then he (Hermans) had the gall to call suicide a disease. It is not a disease. It is an illness.

“A lot of times that illness should be recognized by a support group, and it should be supported by the teachers that recognize this person has an illness,” Young added. “He needs help. Is it his parents? Is it his friends who are not supporting him? We have to address that issue. It’s one of the largest issues in the state of Alaska.”

Young also blamed Alaska suicide rates on the federal government.

“This suicide (problem) didn’t exist until we got largesse from the government,” he said. “When people have to work and had to provide and had to keep warm by … cutting the wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have a suicide problem.”

“It comes from the largesse and saying that you’re not worth anything and you’re gonna get something from nothing,” he said.

Hermans had heard Young’s remarks Thursday.

“I thought they were disgusting,” he said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com.