Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Participant
Mike, I'd be interested in your take on the media treatment and expert commentaries on the teenagers who yesterday committed the abortive carjacking attempt and are alleged to have intent to kill several other youngsters.

Participant
I find this fascinating, "what kind of identity future they felt they were preparing these elite students to occupy." Young people have to build an identity, and what are we giving them to do it with? I assume, without knowing much, that popular culture, itself a culture of young people, is the main source, but I'd love to know more.

Participant
Good points Douglass, and something I have thought about often myself. Youth seem uniquely qualified to lead our society at its current rate of technological advancement.

My father told me once about a science fiction story he read that featured an alien race of creatures with short life spans. Just a few years. This race advanced very quickly, because there were always fresh minds unhindered by habit and tradition.

The driver of human culture seems to be moving younger and younger. At one point the village elders were the most esteemed, respected, and valuable members of the community. Since these were societies based on tradition and passing on the old ways of doing things, it makes sense. Culture, technology, and customs were passed from the elders to the young, thus the holders of the culture were valued highest.

Things have changed over the last few hundred years. Now that we value innovation and science, the focus has shifted to middle-age and is working its way down. With age comes experience, but also intolerance to change. In a highly dynamic society where advanced technology is obsolete in 5-10 years, it is more difficult for older people who are set in their ways. It is no surprise to me that youth are most at home in our information revolution, and are driving innovation and change.

Professions are not passed from generation to generation; they are invented and reinvented by each generation anew. It is expected for a 13 year old to have superior web design and programming skills than his elders. Youth have fresh, unencumbered minds, and this drives innovation. This mechanism that is emerging with technology has already taken hold with culture. Culture is no longer passed from elders to youth, but from youth to elders. Movies, music, and other forms of pop culture are youth driven and youth centric.

In some ways it is as if adults sense their impending obsolescence and are erecting a wall of anti-youth restrictions to retain power in society. Perhaps middle-aged adults fear being declared unnecessary and stuck in a home out of sight and out of mind, like they did to their elders.

Hopefully we will find a way to call a truce in the generation war, and individuals whether they are 15, 45, or 75 can be respected and valued for who they are.

Mike Males
Richard--re media treatment of the three New Jersey teens arrested last week, with all kinds of weaponry after a botched carjacking, in a plot to kill three other teens and conduct random shootings: has anyone noticed how similar this case was to the 48 year-old Mississippi worker who shot 5 co-workers to death, wounded 9 others, and committed suicide the same day? The 18 year-old New Jersey ringleader was described as "an angry young man" who "kept a list" of his enemies he felt had bullied him. The Mississippi shooter was described as "an angry hothead" who "kept score" of his enemies and believed "everyone was against him." The press cited cultural identifications for both--a "Matrix" character for the teen, the Klan for the worker--though the press predictably made a bigger deal out of the teen's media interests, as if this might be the causal factor rather than years of bullying.

The dissed, alienated, angry mass murderer--rejected and/or bullied by co-workers or fellow students, dumped by girlfriend or wife, hostile to boss or teacher--is a recurring pattern among middle-class and upper-income American males from 12 to 80. We have seen these kinds of mass shootings in schools, getting vast publicity, but also in offices, factories, churches, senior citizens' centers, malls and stores, and other public sites as well as homes. The killer is nearly always a middle-class, middle-aged white male (more rarely a black, Hispanic, Asian, or younger male) who feels others are persecuting him. In the last half of 1999 (after April's Columbine shooting), I counted a dozen mass shootings by men in their 30s and 40s that killed 59 people and injured 31. Most were in and out of the national media in one day (for details of these, see

http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/chap-3.htm).

These are not new. A New York Times (April 9-10, 2000) historical account of mass killings found similar patterns going back at least 50 years. There were mass school shootings by college and high school students in the 1960s and 1970s, and many more public massacres by older men. These are what one apt citizen, after a Pennsylvania massacre in 1999, called "the American flu." Most of the killers, like the Mississippi and New Jersey ones last week, had histories of mental health troubles. Black and Hispanic youths and young men virtually never commit mass killings of this kind. What shocks me is that none of the experts commenting on boys' school shootings has drawn the clear connection to similar shootings by adult men in very similar circumstances. As in other areas, intense horror at teen behaviors serves to keep like adult behaviors safely invisible. I recently surveyed my students on bullying in their high schools. Only a minority reported outright bullying, but most of these reported that the school administration waswell aware of the student hierarchy and supported its privileges. As Jon Katz observed in "Geeks," outcast students don't feel adults will help them--quite the obvious. So occasionally there is an incident of extreme violence. And we are back to the question--why so much more often in the US than in other countries?

Participant
And the Mississippi shooter killed five and wounded nine, while the teens didn't even pull off the carjacking, but they are the bigger story.

Mike Males
Alex and Douglass -- I don't know if you saw "Wild in the Streets," a great 1968 film about youth takeover of Congress and politics. There are lots of amusing counterintuitive statements (and one of the best "comeuppance" endings deftly illustrating the difficulty youths have organizing as other minorities do). One line in particular, from the 18 year-old president (badly rendered here), is striking: "All that reliance on maturity and experience is what got our society in so much trouble." The idea is that in a dynamic society, the older generation inevitably imposes yesterday's solutions to yesterday's problems. For example, baby boomers attribute great power to television because it was the premier medium we grew up with. We were heavily influenced by media images in various ways (not all bad), and we naturally presume that because today's TV imagery is

more explicit and advertising more sophisticated, it must therefore be seducing kids even more effectively than we were. Yet, if you read trade magazines (Business Week had a great cover story on this), you see advertisers lamenting that today's youth market is more fragmented and sophisticated, and techniques like celebrity endorsements and hard-sell don't work with today's third-generation TV youth niches the way they did with boomers. Viewing mass media as a disease (which we boomers often do), we assume the "infection" rate will be as high in the third generation exposed to it as it was in the first, when in fact youths today have greater media immunity--which is precisely why programmers and advertisers are pushing new, more ingenious ways to reach them. So we frantically push ratings, v-chips, internet filters, and other censorious schemes to protect youth from what we find arousing or horrifying but which doesn't have nearly the dramatic effect on them that we believe. A similar analogy can be made for drugs (boomers, the first exposed to hard drugs in middle-class populations) had high, persistent addiction problems; today's kids, seeing the problems in boomer generations, avoid heroin, cocaine, and speed and mainly use soft drugs like beer, marijuana, and ecstasy. What is difficult is coming up with today's solutions to today's problems in a climate in which my older generation had a number of bitter experiences in our past (and, with drugs, in our present) that frighten us into simplistic, harsh puritanical regimes and away from calm, moderate, harm reducing, individual-oriented approaches.

Participant
Perhaps one reason we are afraid of youth now is because, at some level, we realize that the distinctions between us and them are arbitrary, irrelevant, and that the mechanisms for holding youths in place are increasingly fragile, even if they are more and more oppressive.

If we were to admit children and youth to full membership in society, it would create a major upheaval. To take just one example, the labor force would increase hugely, and with it unemployment of many adults. A frightening prospect, no doubt.

Mike Males
Richard--what happened in Mississippi was a "Columbine"--14 gun casualties by a crazed shooter. True, the Mississippi massacre got national headlines for a day or two, but none of the hysterical clarions of social apocalypse that have enshrined Columbine now for 4 years (hard to believe it was that long ago, given how fresh the media and academic commentators keep it). I have no issue with those who argue Columbine was a tragic, terrible event meriting extensive news coverage and analysis, but the lack of perspective grown adults display as well as our indifference to equally tragic, terrible shootings by adults that don't fit our current political needs, is appalling. To me, it challenges our right to be called responsible grownups. Should we be encouraging youths to be a part of an adult society like this?

I realize I am coming down hard on grownups, due in large part to years of frustration at what I see as America's blind, mean-spirited, bigoted public discussion of age and generation issues. Anyone take a more favorable view toward the older generation? I'd be delighted to be proven wrong in my pessimism about us.

Participant
I think the description of adults you make is completely accurate, but partly created and intensified by the media. I lay the blame specifically on our inability to distinguish what in our society should be treated as public service, and what as appropriate for the private sector. With media concentrated in the private sector, it not only is oriented to exploit what it sees as a market, but to actually develop markets. It is in the development of a market that we have the incessant coverage of a Columbine, or a Jon Benet Ramsey, Laci Peterson, O.J. Simpson, etc. I lay much of the blame for our entry into the Iraq war on the development of war fever through the media's repetitive coverage of administrative pronouncements, creation of powerful logos, all designed to build ratings.

Journalism should be a profession, with investigative power and balanced perspective, but it is increasingly feckless as it is more and more in the service of the private sector. If we had responsible journalism in our service, we might have somewhat different attitudes toward the young. But there is big money in exploiting and reinforcing our nervousness about our relationship to a group of competent people who are being held in a kind of suspended animation, unable to express themselves fully along any dimension of social participation.

Participant
I just returned from seeing "Spellbound", a documentary about the national spelling bee. It is a marvelously affecting film. If only all of America could see these adolescents, we might have a very different view of that population.

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