[UC] Kids Today

[R. Hotchkiss]

 
 

 
Three years ago Fiesta Pizza was forced by the zoning board to give up some
of their pool tables and pinball machines.  The SHCA was vociferous in its
opposition to these amusements and got Janie Blackwell to support their
cause.  SHCA members claimed that the availability of these amusements
caused juveniles to commit more crimes, use more drugs and have more unwed
pregnancies than they would in the absence of this amusement opportunity.  I
argued that hanging out in the public of a pizza shop after school was
definitely safer and more constructive than going home to an empty house
(the kid's own or a friend's), where sex and drugs could occur freely until
someone's mom got home at 6.

This month's issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores why the percentage of
teenagers who are criminals has shot up so drastically in the last decade
(particularly in Vermont, once thought of as childhood innocence's last
stand.)  And how giving kids something legal to do in the presence of adults
is the way to keep crime down.  Taking away legal things that kids like to
do, simply because adults find teenagers loud and distasteful, is actually a
cause of what drives teens into more dangerous pursuits of amusement.
(Dangerous first to them, and later to us.)

What follows is a few very short cuts-and-pastes from the article at
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/powers.htm
I hope you skip my summary below and read the whole article.  I hope it
causes you to think about what you, not being a parent to a teen, could do
to keep neighborhood teens from turning into criminals who could prey on
you.  Because there's things we can do today to make for a better tomorrow.
You might think you know what it's like to be a teen today.  But if you're
over 32 (like me), you're probably wrong.

The Apocalypse of Adolescence
INCLUDEPICTURE  \d "/images/1pt.gif"
This spring one of two Vermont teenagers charged with the knifing murder of
two Dartmouth College professors will go on trial. The case offers entry to
a disturbing subject-acts of lethal violence committed by "ordinary"
teenagers from "ordinary" communities, teenagers who have become detached
from civic life, saturated by the mythic violent imagery of popular culture,
and consumed by the dictates of some private murderous fantasy.

On February 16 the New Hampshire attorney general announced that an arrest
warrant had at last been issued in the Zantrop murders: for a
seventeen-year-old boy, Robert Tulloch, from Chelsea, and his
sixteen-year-old friend Jimmy Parker.

In their unvexed small-town habitat, and in the apparent absence of any
motivating passions, Robert Tulloch and Jimmy Parker may come to be seen as
representatives of a new mutation in the evolution of the murderous American
adolescent.

Vermont's Department of Corrections reported that it supervised or housed
one in ten Vermont males of high school age.  A report by the northern New
England consortium HYPERLINK "http://www.justiceworks.unh.edu/"Justiceworks,
released in 2000, asserted that "while overall crime rates are down in
northern New England, a greater proportion of those crimes are being
committed by children under the age of 18."

Some months after all the excitement had ebbed, I mentioned my bewilderment
to Chris Frappier, an investigator with the state public defender's office.
Frappier is a cheerful fellow with a beard and an earring who himself grew
up poor in a small Vermont town.  "Look at the communities in this state
that wage war on their youth. You've got Vergennes, kicking kids out of the
park. You've got Woodstock banning skateboarding." The detective grew more
heated as he spoke. "What I'm seeing in recent years is the total and
complete alienation of youth," he said. "And it is not coming from them;
it's coming from the adults who aren't bothering to reach out to them. And
it is terrifying. Straight hedonistic drugs and music and misogynism. I walk
Church Street in Burlington and I see kids that are walking dead and know
it. And that is the biggest change of my lifetime in Vermont."
 

Holly Hotchkiss