Jonesboro, Ark., is everybody’s worst nightmare. If only the murderers could be monsters instead of open-faced, freckle-nosed, innocent-looking little boys. If only they came from dark, dank, rat-infested urban streets. Some have tried to make it a Southern thing, but I don’t think anybody really believes it. No, Jonesboro is another in a near constant stream of shocking adolescent behaviors. Except now it is happening on the streets where we live. We have lost touch. We do not know our own kids.
Today’s adolescents are a tribe apart. A clear picture of our teens, of even our own children, eludes us–not necessarily because they are rebelling or evading us, but because we aren’t there. We as a society have inadvertently abandoned this age group as the cost of progress in the workplace. In a nation that still has not come to terms with a program of safe, affordable day care, by the time the kids reach adolescence we breathe a sigh of relief that they can spend time alone for hours each day. And alone they are except for each other–nobody’s home but the kids in neighborhoods that have become hollow monuments to family life. Not just parents are gone; all the grown-ups are somewhere else. Over time the hours roll into days, the days into years, so that by graduation from high school, he or she could have spent six to eight years without consistent, meaningful adult contact. As one 16-year-old explains it, “You basically have a life of your own.” Has anybody stopped to think about the potential ramifications of this severing of the generations created de facto by the lack of time and the fast pace of modern life? A vacuum has consequences.
This freedom changes everything. Most obviously, it changes access to a bed, a liquor cabinet, a car. But the effects go beyond issues of rules and discipline to the idea exchanges between generations that do not occur, the conversations not had, the guidance and role-modeling not taking place, the wisdom and traditions no longer filtering down inevitably. Learning about life cannot just be relegated to schools. The informal lessons of growing up absorbed from the previous generation, or chosen in reaction to the previous generation, are lost. Kids today need to experience loving relationships to learn how to have them themselves, they need to acquire methods of conflict resolution, manners, ways of connecting and expressing themselves. How can kids imitate and learn from adults if they never talk to them? How can they form the connections to trust adult wisdom if there is inadequate contact? The generational threads that used to weave their way into the fabric of growing up are missing.
The failure to grasp these basic life skills is like a deadly anthrax in our culture putting our children at risk for unhealthy responses to life’s normal pressures, let alone the extraordinary ones they often face.
In the vacuum where traditional behavioral expectations for young people used to exist, in the silence of empty homes and neighborhoods, young people have built their own community. The adolescent community is a creation by default, an amorphous grouping of young people that constitutes the world in which adolescents spend their time. Their dependence on each other fulfills the universal human longing for community and inadvertently cements the notion of a tribe apart. More than a group of peers, it becomes in isolation a society with its own values, ethics, rules, world view, rites of passage, worries, joys and momentum. It becomes teacher, adviser, entertainer, challenger, nurturer, inspirer and sometimes destroyer. Having spent every day for more than three years in this community of adolescents for my book, “A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence,” I discovered that the best of kids regularly put themselves in situations adults would consider unhealthy or dangerous, but which they considered “normal” or “the adolescent way of life.”
Kids today defy all stereotypes. Scott Johnson, Mitchell Johnson’s dad, insisted in a tear-choked voice that there was not a single clue that his son would do such a thing to his classmates in Jonesboro. A churchgoing, music-playing, polite child, the 13-year-old Mitchell never revealed a darkness and certainly no homicidal tendencies. I don’t know any murderers, but in my book I tell the tale of a young man who goes to church, wrangles with spiritual issues, has a close family and is both a Boy Scout and a drug dealer.
In the nineties, the proverbial generation gap has become a gaping hole that serves the continuity of generations and leaves a huge opening for kids to fall through. We must consider this separation of adolescents from the adult world as a phenomenon in its own right. It may hold insights for unraveling some of the mysteriously shocking behavior of our youth. It has created it. It transforms the environment for all kids–even for the small number who may actually have adults around regularly in their lives.
Jonesboro is the worst of horrors. As we watched parents cling to their children who escaped slaughter, as we watch parents of dead children hold on to their friends who are trying to console them, as we listen to Scott Johnson recount hugging his weeping son in the courthouse telling him he loves him, as we hear about the boys crying and asking to go home to mommy, we should, through our own tears, take stock and pause. Where are our priorities? We must reintegrate the adolescent tribe back into the fabric of a caring society that pays attention to them before a crisis breaks.
