Mike
Males, c Youth Today, June 2003
"Talk
to your kids about..." drugs, violence, and sex, ads by West Wing
celebrities, drug czars, and other panacea-types urge. But, what should
grownups say?
How
about: "Kids! Don’t act like us!"
American
adults practice and abet the Western world’s worst adult drug abuse, murder,
gun carnage, imprisonment, homelessness, poverty, AIDS, unplanned pregnancy,
drunkenness, obesity, voter apathy, avaricious consumerism, family breakup,
murders of children, and child hunger--by far. We tell pollsters in massive
numbers our goal is to pile up as much wealth as our richest 1 percent, it’s
fine to kill thousands of innocent people to avenge terrorism, and any excuse
for a quick and dirty war will serve.
We
benefited from well-funded schools and social services when we were growing up,
then greedily cut our taxes and denied today’s youths like opportunity. We
spend twice as much on gambling than education. We menace motorways in
gas-swilling Sports Utility Tanks, blow billions on medically-useless cosmetic
vanities, and panic like stampeded sheep at every cockamamie alarmism
politicians and News at 11 bray.
What
lessons should youths learn from the latest abysmal moral example set by
American adults who, previously doubtful about war against Iraq, tamely backed
it after President Bush barged ahead? Squelch your conscience, kids, and go
along with the dominant crowd even if you think it’s wrong? Forget laws and
rules; bullying works? Only attack weaklings who can’t fight back? Winning is
everything--especially if it’s easy? Spout lofty principles but seize the loot?
Horrified
at youngsters picking up our real attitudes and behaviors (which experts
comically label "adolescent rebellion"), we spend billions funding
prevention programs whose unadmitted mission is to prevent kids from acting
like adults.
"My
school was telling us not to call names or beat people up," puzzled one
Maryland student to the Washington Post ("What We Learned In School
Today," March 31) of his school’s conflict resolution classes. "Now
we see the government bombing Iraq. It seems it's, ‘Do as we say, not as we
do.’"
Yet,
school administrators who innovate nonviolence programs must wonder if their
old ways--letting, even helping, popular kids bully the losers--better prepared
students for a cold new America in which naked self-interest and cruelty define
how elites use power against the disadvantaged.
For
example, teens contemplating military careers, watch how the troops--the
self-sacrificing young men and women loudly "supported" by righteous
flag-wavers--are treated now that the war’s over. Note that the ultra-patriotic
House of Representatives slashed $25 billion from Bush’s already paltry
Veterans’ Affairs funding proposal for the next decade. Axed were $10 billion
from veterans' medical care, $15 billion from disability services, and $200
million for educating veterans’ children.
These
cuts to the VA’s strapped budget come as 1.7 million veterans (including
230,000 from Gulf War I) suffering war-related injuries and illnesses lack
promised services, 200,000 with immediate traumas wait six months for hospital
treatment, and 270,000 veterans are homeless. Federal studies show Vietnam
veterans suffer vastly elevated drug abuse, suicide, violent death,
imprisonment, and war-related illness.
Wake
up, young, would-be soldiers: after you fight and suffer for the USA, you’re
expendable trash. Your school’s cheery military recruiting propaganda doesn’t
mention that while Washington’s favored contractors reap billions in profits to
wreck and rebuild a ravaged Iraq, thousands of servicemen and -women subsist on
food stamps.
Pay
heed to your elders’ true message: sacrificing for your country is for suckers!
Ask instead what your country can do for YOU. Look at who America most richly
rewards: the war-whooping politicians, pundits, and corporate executives who
dodged military duty to line their own pockets and now bask in adulation,
affluence, and tax cuts.
Reversing America’s bankrupt values requires true adolescent rebellion. Young people: TALK to grownups about adult violence, drug abuse, selfishness, materialism, killing innocent people for political and business profit, the skills you learned in "conflict resolution" classes--that is, fundamental moral ideals. Here’s an ice-breaker: "Mom, Dad (Stepmom, Absentee Dad, Newest Significant Other), when you were growing up back in the Sixties..."
Mike
Males (http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales) worked with youths for 15
years and now teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.