Why teens turn violent

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Why teens turn violent				May 25, 2006

Not too many years ago, Angela Lansbury (alias Jessica Fletcher) was up in her properly pacific hamlet of Cabot Cove, Maine writing about and solving murders every week. Murder, she wrote.

What Jessica knew well was that, while we feign repulsion every time we read about some grisly murder, our cultural genes were generated in blood and are replete with historical blood feuds. And these primarily between young men.

No sooner had God created humans than Adam and Eve had at it and produced two boys. In a fit of envy, Cain soon bloodied and killed his brother Abel. Banished from Eden, Cain wandered off to the nowhere land of Nod, where he found an apparently autochthonous wife.

Early in the 20^th century, opera composer Rudi Stephan, a contemporary of Freud, introduced some rhythmic reality into the Genesis myth and in his “Die ersten Menschen” (“The First People”) has Cain and Abel battling each other for intimacies with Eve. Totally oblivious to the Nod nonsense, they reasonably believed that she was the only woman in the game at this point.

Greek myth is similarly riddled with male blood feuds, not the least of which has Cronos, the father of Zeus, castrating his father Uranus with a sickle. From the blood of the wound arose those darkest of destructively vengeful divinities, the Erinyes.

Given the homicidal mythological template into which we all, as humans, are locked, why is it that we recoil in horror when we see on the front page of the Gazette a headline reading “A cycle of weapons and violence,” and a gruesome story about two teenagers and a 20-year-old who shot to death one teen and wounded another on Chickahominy Road?

Why can’t we understand the actions of a bright youth who was president of his class at Lafayette High, but who, on May 4, became unhinged and shot to death a man with whom he was arguing outside a convenience store?

Our first reaction is to blame it all on drugs and the unwarranted availability of firearms. Or we look to our apparently failing educational system and the unacceptable dropout rate of primarily black teens from the public schools. Don’t we provide enough adequate counseling? Aren’t there recreational facilities galore and after-school or summer programs in which young men can participate and work out their frustrations?

Or perhaps the crux of the issue lies in the unacceptable number of young men born out of wedlock. Certainly single mothers can’t be expected to work and properly raise a family at the same time. Or is the family structure itself the problem?

Are parents so preoccupied by today’s economic necessities or social requirements that they no longer consider the nurturing and moral upbringing of their children an ultimate priority? Why can’t parents keep their kids off the streets and away from the ubiquitous lure of drugs, guns and fatal combat?

On the other hand, why aren’t the threats of the law and the presence of police a sufficient deterrent to teen violence? Could it be that growth has run amok and that our resources, including the police department, are stretched to the limit? Why have increased population percentages far outstripped the concomitant percent of county police added to the force in the last two or three years? Is it finally time to take a serious look at the repercussions of unfettered growth on our already overtaxed resources?

All of these are valid considerations, and I suppose that the sum of them would go far in explaining why the propensity to accept murder as a viable final solution is gaining prevalence among teens.

Yet, if Aristotle and any number of other philosophers and political scientists are correct, it is the moral construct of the state itself that should be the first line of defense against the irrationality and tendency toward violence that abides in humans. When Aristotle spoke of man as a political animal, he meant that the primary emphasis of any citizenry should be on educating its young men to become productive members of the polis, or city state.

The fact that such instruction has become for us a lost art is no small part of our present peril.

Not only do we live in a nation whose foreign policy consists to a great degree of a robust reliance on militarism, but we have so sacrificed the educational norms that served us well in the past that our primary concern now is that Johnny can read simple sentences, add numbers, engage in sports and drive a car.

As a result, we have lost whatever insistence we once had that our public schools become viaducts for the waters of responsible citizenship and a polity at harmony with itself.

In addition, we are all too comfortable with the notion that patriotic prattle and calls to support troops in machismo-driven wars don’t have any effect on today’s teenagers. If blood-spilling is the answer to national problems, why is it not a suitable response in individual altercations?

Rather than weaning our young people away from our genetic penchant for violence, we have encouraged and inflamed the passions of Genesis to the point that we’ll all wind up under Jehovah’s curse in the land of Nod. And there, I suspect, Jessica Fletcher will be waiting with pen in hand.