A reader, Dan, emailed me the other day in response to my diary
"Today's youth". He asked me, essentially, why society had reached a point where children could behave so violently and with so little regard for others and what could be done about it.
I wish I had some easy answers and some quick fixes, but I don't. I don't think anyone does. But I do have some thoughts on where to begin.
The problem of youth violence and youth's hopelessness doesn't arise from a simple, easy to diagnose social indicator such as poverty, lack of a two-parent home, or being born out of wedlock. Violence and hopelessness can be seen across ethnic and socioeconomic strata. Nor is the problem solely lack of parental supervision or a "shiftlessness" in today's youth. All of these can be contributing factors, but I do not feel that they are the principal culprits.
I suspect that students' behavior is a result of fundamental changes in American culture over the last few generations. I don't mean this in the sense that hip-hop, Janet Jackson's nipple, or violence in entertainment are to blame. Rather, I believe that American culture has become too attuned to consumerism: an individualistic, materialistic focus exists in American society, one that tells children they need to have more, more, MORE just to be happy, and God help you if it's not Fubu or Tommy Hilfiger or some other label du jour (usually the more expensive the better). This mentality also teaches them to care for "number one" first and their small circles second.
This all leads to a loss of any kind of sense of community identity in a larger sense. Families, close circles of friends, and occasionally religious communities are the only communities we have now. Our 24/7, amped up media shows us all the horrors of the world. Thanks to it, tragedies in Poughkeepsie, Wisconsin can seem like they are right next door. Entertainment media, and the news cycle, teach us that anyone, anywhere can be a predator. Consequently, we don't trust one another. Therefore, we form small, insular groups that ostracize others and shun a sense of larger community. Without these larger communities, our social identities are very narrowly defined, which decreases our ability to empathize with outsiders.
This kind of living situation helps to propogate violence. Sure, children model violence that is learned at home, but not all violence stems from the home, and not all violence in the home is pathological. Some of it is environmental. Add the stresses of living in small, insular units to the stress of trying to survive in today's economy and society, and the pressure can build to exploding.
I feel that the chief cause of violence among today's youth is their sense that they lack any kind of power. Anger is a survival mechanism. It is convenient, easy to access, releases endorphins and adrenaline and is accompanied by a sense of physical release. But more than that, anger is the surest and easiest way to control one's environment. People are less apt to hurt you if they know you can hurt them. People change their behavior, alter things to suit you, if you can get angry enough, be violent enough. When systems are large enough, like school, the police, parents, government, society, and so on, rage can feel like your only option. Anger is powerful, makes you feel powerful. Through their anger, their violence, children, adolescents, and teens finally become actors in their environment, affecting some kind of change; when you've felt powerless for long enough, any kind of change, even negative, feels good.
So, to answer Dan's second question: What can we do?
I believe that the first step is to return a sense of power to children's lives. They need a mechanism for exerting change, for feeling respected and listened to. They need mechanisms for change that are constructive and active, that don't involve violence but do allow them to achieve tangible results. I am actively working on a model for this based along Paulo Friere's "popular education" model and Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." I hope to have the model prepared for presentation to the City of San Jose by this time next year.
In the longer term, we need to return a sense of larger community to America. America is afraid. Afraid of each other, of strangers, of what might happen. Consequently, Americans tend to think and act from that fearful place, which creates totally ineffective solutions because fear is irrational and totally emotional. Fear, as Frank Herbert said in "Dune," is the mind-killer. Fear causes us to react instead of act. When we operate out of fear we estrange the "other" and become insular. We need to defeat the culture of fear and hopelessness and create a culture of mutual support. This will, I think, take generations (it's a lot easier to tear down than build up).
That's my two cents, for what they're worth.
-Jim
Cross-posted at Los Punditos.