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The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002
The Apocalypse of Adolescence
" ... an apocalyptic nihilism is taking root in this nation's children ... Since the end of World War II adolescents have been chafing against an ever more impervious, unheeding social system. Their outrage has found expression, with increasing intensity, among the inchoate 'juvenile delinquents' of the early postwar years, the Beats of the 1950s, the hippies and political radicals of the 1960s, the drug and gangland subcultures of more recent years. And now it's expressed by the kids who carry out school shootings and other acts of vicious and inexplicable violence."
"What we are witnessing is clearly something new. A frightening momentum has been building ... the public policy that we are developing to cope with troubled kids is only exacerbating the situation. ... the state's growing arrogation of power to punish rather than to rehabilitate. This is a policy that expresses both fear of and contempt for children."
"'We understand how teens think, what they want, what they like, what they aspire to be, what excites them, and what concerns them,' the Teenage Research Unlimited Web site brags. What this understanding translates into in the marketplace is hypersexuality, aggression, addiction, coldness, and irony-laced civic disaffection—the very seed-bed of apocalyptic nihilism."
"The national task of recentering ourselves and our children will be enormous, and will require painful shifts in our expectations of expediency, personal gratification, and the unfettered accumulation of wealth. ... Children crave a sense of self-worth. That craving is answered most readily through respectful inclusion: through a reintegration of our young into the intimate circles of family and community life. We must face the fact that having ceased to exploit children as laborers, we now exploit them as consumers. We must find ways to offer them useful functions, tailored to their evolving capacities. Closely allied to this goal is an expanded definition of 'education' ... to embrace an ethic of sustained mentoring that extends from community to personal relationships." ... [more]
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