Family Instability Fuels Rising Nihilism Among Young Men
This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a blindfold. Somehow, we had created a collective atmosphere where the coolest person was the guy who had most recently done the most dangerous thing. Before the fireworks incident, Seth held the top spot because he had won a fight against some other kid at a party the weekend before. Which was probably one reason that we targeted him. He d had his time at the top, but we couldn t let him stay there for long. Now it was his turn to be humiliated.
Observing how young males act in social groups, the cultural anthropologists Ruth Borker and Daniel Maltz have written: Nondominant boys are rarely excluded from play but are made to feel the inferiority of their status positions in no uncertain terms. And since hierarchies fluctuate, every boy gets his chance to be victimized and must learn to take it. For us, it sure worked that way.
As psychologist Joyce F. Benenson observes, boys, especially neglected boys, often band together to cause trouble. Male groups are formed initially because male peers are so drawn to one another, and away from everyone else, she writes. They may fight, they usually compete . . . . Even boys with behavioral problems, who cannot follow any adult authority s directions, group together, through graffiti writing, skateboarding, or gang fights.
We didn t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we did. Seth got thrown out of his house and wouldn t tell us why. Josh and Brandon s dad had been divorced five times, and he was always traveling for work. My adoptive mother had recently moved to another town. When I called her every two weeks or so, I lied that my grades were good and that I was doing all my homework. Maybe if we did something severe enough, they would give us their attention. Maybe if we got into enough trouble, or needed enough help, they would be more like the parents we wanted. On some level, we had stopped caring about ourselves in order to get them to care for us. When adults let their children down, kids learn to make choices that let themselves down. Our disappointment with adults led us to believe that rules weren t actually legitimate. They were invented by adults to keep us from having fun. Why should we listen?