The number one British single today in 1959:
Today in 1964, the Beatles set a record for advance sales, even though with 2.1 million sales the group would argue …
The number one single today in 1967:
No comments on Presty the DJ for March 16
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The first recorded school shooting in the United States took place in 1840, when a law student shot and killed his professor at the University of Virginia. But the modern fear dawned on April 20, 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 12 classmates and a teacher, and then themselves, at Colorado’s Columbine High. Since then, the murder of children in their classrooms has come to seem common, a regular feature of modern American life, and our fears so strong that we are certain the next horror is sure to come not long after the last.
The Education Department reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine, approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the recent slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (and a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., on Wednesday that police called accidental that left one student dead). That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.
The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume, especially in the glare of heart-wrenching news coverage after an event like Parkland. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports.
We sometimes seek protection from our fears in ways that put us in greater peril. In responding to the Parkland shooting, we may be doing just that to our kids.
Statistics seem cold and irrelevant compared with how the evil of a school shooting makes us feel. The victims are children, and research on the psychology of risk has found that few risks worry us more than threats to kids. Parents who send their precious children to school each morning are relinquishing control over their safety; that same research has found that lack of control makes any risk feel more threatening. The parents at Columbine and Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas placed their faith in the school systems, trust that was cruelly violated — and mistrust fuels fear, too, for the parents and all of us.
We don’t really think about risk in terms of 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1 million in the first place. And when we do see such numbers, the only thing we think is, “My kid could be the one,” so even the tiniest risk appears unacceptably high. That powerful combination of psychological characteristics moots any suggestion that fear of a certain risk is irrationally excessive. Numerically, maybe. Emotionally, not at all.
That’s the thing about risk. We assess it less on the likelihood of the outcome and more on the emotional nature of the experience involved in getting to that outcome. The probability of dying doesn’t matter as much as the way you die. That’s why the infinitesimally low risk of being eaten by a shark scares millions of people out of the ocean, and why vanishingly rare plane crashes scare travelers into their cars and trucks (a statistically riskier way to get around). School shootings also trigger powerful emotions that swamp the odds.
And the more frightening a risk feels to you and me, the more coverage it usually gets in the news media, which focuses on things most likely to get our attention. Rare events with high emotional valence often get coverage disproportionate to their likelihood, further magnifying our fears. As a result of what the cognitive sciences call “the awareness heuristic” — a mental shortcut we use to quickly assess the likely frequency of things we don’t know much about — the more readily an event leaps to mind from our memory, or the more persistently it’s in the news, the more emotionally powerful and probable it feels. School shootings and the debate about gun control are prime examples. A threat feels more threatening if it’s getting a lot of attention. …
Fear also leads us to do things in pursuit of safety that may do more harm than what we’re afraid of in the first place. Think about the psychological effects on kids from all those lessons about when to run, how to hide, directions from their parents to call home if a shooting occurs. A few children have even brought guns to school, saying they wanted to protect their classmates . What happens to children’s ability to learn if they spend their time in the classroom wondering, even if only occasionally, who’s going to burst in and open fire? What does the chronic stress of such worry do to their health? What do constant messages of potential danger in a place that’s supposed to be safe do to their sense of security in the world? Across the population of public school children in the United States, fear of this extraordinarily rare risk is almost certainly doing far more overall harm than have the shootings themselves, horrendous as they are.
Robby Soave might argue we’re already at maximum worrywarting:
Students across the country plan[ned] to walk out of class at 10:00 a.m. [Wednesday] to protest the government’s failure to prevent crimes like the massacre at Parkland by tightening gun laws.
In doing so, the students are providing more evidence that increased safety is indeed the paramount goal of modern millennial and Gen Z political activism. They want to feel comfortable and protected, and they are willing to curtail other people’s rights to achieve this.
“It’s not Republican or Democrat; it’s about keeping people safe,” Arielle Geismar, a 16-year-old student from Manhattan, told Vox.
Another student activist, 18-year-old Fiorina Talaba, said, “We know what we want from our society: to have less guns and, at some point, no guns at all.”*
Perhaps ironically, the administrators at Geismar’s school also cited public safety as their top concern, and used it to justify their reticence about the planned walkout:
Arielle Geismar, a 16-year-old junior at the Beacon School in Manhattan, said her school administrators were primarily focused on student safety. “There definitely was pushback in terms of disrupting classes,” she said. “But we’re going to be loud, and we’re not going to apologize for that. I think that’s also the point of the walkout. We’re going to make ourselves heard whether you want to hear it or not.”
Of course Geismar and her fellow activists shouldn’t apologize for making themselves heard, being loud, or walking out of class. Nor should their First Amendment rights be curtailed because some overly cautious administrators are concerned about safety. Public safety is frequently used as a pretext for trampling the civil rights of some group or another. Think of racist stop-and-frisk policies, the anti-Muslim bigotry of domestic War on Terror paranoia, or the immigrant purges of the Trump era. Such measures are often justified on grounds of safety, security, and comfort.
Young people would therefore be justified in treating any safety-related abridgments of their rights with skepticism. Yet this post-Parkland student activism seems grounded in the exact same thinking: that we should sacrifice the rights of one group—gun owners—in order to make everybody else feel safer.
Whether doing this would actually make anyone safer is of course the subject of considerable policy debate. But just feeling safe is incredibly important to the current crop of high school and college students, who came of age during a time of increasingly paranoid parenting and hypersensitivity toward harm. Students certainly do deserve literal safety from violence. In many ways, they already do: Schools are safer than they used to be, and mass shootings are no more common. Unfortunately, these actual, dramatic social gains might seem counterintuitive to kids who live at a time of constant media coverage of murder, terror, and death. And the right caters to these fears by pushing airport-style security, more cops in schools, and metal detectors as reasonable solutions to school shootings, even though there’s little reason to believe these ideas work.
One of the main goals of this movement is to raise the legal age to purchase an AR-15 from 18 to 21, so these young activists are sometimes clearly willing to impose limits on their own freedoms as well as other people’s. Whatever you think of the gun issue, there’s reason to be concerned about just how much freedom the fragile generation would happily give away in order to feel safer—even when they’re getting safer already.
If today’s children favor safety over freedom, their parents have failed them.
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Richard Kelsey has nothing good to say about yesterday’s National Walkout Day walker-outers:
If your child has cut class today to join a left-wing national walkout movement in protest of the Bill of Rights, you have failed as a parent. You are either Constitutionally ignorant or you are a partisan zealot who has misinformed the same kid you can’t trust to make his or her bed.
Most American adults are so misinformed about the Constitution, it is frightening. Now, we are to believe their kids are the policy wonks and Bill of Rights experts this country has been missing for a few hundred years.
The only net positive about the walkout today is that in many areas, kids are leaving failed government schools that ration to them misinformation. Gleeful parents are posting on social media their pride for their kids standing up to be heard.
Here’s a surprise … I might think the kids silly and the parents stupid, but I do support the right of people to be silly and stupid. That doesn’t mean I support the right of kids to break the rules. Nor do I support school districts improperly endorsing an anti-Bill of Rights protest by letting kids off the hook for cutting class.
It means that if protesting your own Second Amendment, Bill of Rights is so important to you, then I support you doing it. And, I support the schools enforcing their disciplinary rules against every student.
Yes … this should go on your permanent record.
The best lesson of the day isn’t that Americans are ill-informed about the Second Amendment and the causes of gun violence by broken humans raised in broken homes generated by a decaying, left-wing society. The best lesson is that actions have consequences.
If you want to “make a stand,” and “stick it to the man,” then your stand is meaningless if no price is to be paid.
Government schools have no right to endorse or excuse kids engaged in political dissent that breaks the rules, no matter the popularity of the event. Indeed, public schools have an obligation to enforce their rules scrupulously without regard to the political message or intent.
You think this is harsh? You probably think the Second Amendment is for the police and military too. My guess is, like your kids in the street, you are wholly ignorant of the Second Amendment and you have bought into the myths and false explanations of it.
Inform yourselves. While you are at it, inform your kids. Someone must since they cut school today.
America … the enemy of your children is you. An uninformed populace incapable of critical thought, desperate to cede to the government its most important fundamental right, is a danger to liberty and the civil society.
If you want to stop mass shootings and gun violence, raise kids in stable, educated, loving homes with two compassionate, informed, unselfish parents.
Guns don’t have anger issues, mental health issues, suicidal tendencies, psychotic breaks, or sociopathic tendencies … people do. And they grow worse in a decaying culture of immorality, indecency, divorce, and fatherlessness.
Get out and protest the culture you built.
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Today being the Ides (Ide?) of March, let’s begin with the Ides of March …
… an outstanding example of brass rock.
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley signed a management contract with Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands who named himself Colonel Tom Parker.
The number two single that day:
The number one British album today in 1969 was Cream’s “Goodbye,” which was, duh, their last album:
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James Wigderson notes today:
In case you’re not aware, today is Pi Day, or March 14th, or 3.14. Those of you who didn’t skip math class to go protest will remember that Pi, or π, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or π=c/d. The circumference of a circle it 2πr and the area of a circle is πr² which is really funny because everyone knows pies are round.
It’s an old joke, and I’m sure the Ancient Greeks thought it was funny. It’s like the little acorn in math class who suddenly exclaims, “Gee, I’m a tree!” Sound it out a couple of times, and then tell your kids that one.
I know where my daughter is today because today is the day parents can join their kids for lunch at school. And given a long experience with school cafeterias, I am definitely bringing my own lunch. (It’s a school so I won’t be bringing the WC Fields special.)
Unfortunately, in so many other schools, kids are being transported to little protest spots to be props for Democrats seeking to make gun control an issue. In Madison, the high school kids are being transported from West, Lafollette and Memorial High Schools to East High School by bus so they then can go march on the Capitol.
But we know it’s a spontaneous uprising of the kids, right? Because so many of them have the wherewithal and credit cards necessary to charter buses.
Governor Scott Walker, wisely, will be out of the Capitol today at a bill signing. And state Senate Republicans are meeting behind closed doors today to actually work on a real school safety plan, not the result of a hyped-up tantrum that’ll be thrown outside the Capitol today.
In other words, the grownups are working. Some are working at manipulating kids for their own ends, while others are actually working today to solve the state’s problems.
The losers today are the children who get to be used as political props and then miss a day of school. They’re going to learn the wrong lessons. Instead of learning about math, or even about the life of Dr. Stephen Hawking, they’re going to learn that as long as they throw a tantrum, adults will pretend to listen. The media that’s covering these student protests as legitimate are doing the kids no favors, either.
There is no wisdom to be found in adolescence, nor in indulging the adolescents. Wisdom is found in reason, experience and listening, something Wisconsin’s Democrats haven’t learned since they began their tantrum in 2011. -
Maybe instead of protesting the deaths of 17 in Parkland, Fla. (as if someone actually favors killing high school students and staff) today or the method of their deaths (as if someone bent on killing someone wouldn’t come up with another method were guns to magically disappear), perhaps today should be taken up thinking about this:
On a related theme:
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The texting shorthand term “smh” (“shakes my head”) didn’t exist in 1955 because texting didn’t exist in 1955.
But surely “smh” was invented for things like this: Today in 1955, CBS talent scout Arthur Godfrey made a signing decision between Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.
Godfrey chose Boone.
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The renewal of calls for gun control in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shootings is, as usual for political disputes, fraught with emotionalism triumphing over facts and logic, not to mention brazen disregard for our constitutional rights.
For instance: Is there an epidemic of school shootings right now? Northeastern University reports:
The deadly school shooting this month in Parkland, Florida, has ignited national outrage and calls for action on gun reform. But while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.
Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.
Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant. …
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. In research publishing later this year, Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel found that on average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year, and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school. …Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s. …
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.
Ryan McMaken adds:
Part of the problem with accepting the crisis narrative is that it ignores other priorities and other problems that may deserve our attention elsewhere.
After all, resources for schools — or anything else — are not unlimited, and it is unclear that extremely rare events like school shootings can be put forward as a priority.
This problem of priorities can be seen in the fact that cities where snow falls irregularly do not maintain a huge fleet of snowplows. In Naples, Italy last week, for example, the city experienced the largest snowfall it’s seen in 50 years. According to the Daily Mail, the snowfall was seen as a citywide emergency and “[r]esidents have been told not to leave their homes unless it is ‘strictly necessary.’” One man was said to have even frozen to death in the unexpectedly frigid temperatures.
Now, if even a few inches of snow can bring the city to a standstill and endanger the lives of residents, why does the city not have far more snow plows than it does? Why is there not a network of emergency workers to ensure that residents are not caught in the cold where they can be injured or even killed by cold temperatures?
The answer, of course, is that the opportunity cost of such measures would be extremely high. By maintaining personnel and equipment designed to address a rare snowfall, the city would be foregoing the opportunity to train people or purchase equipment for a wide variety of other activities that are no doubt also deemed essential.
While school shootings no doubt have a greater psychological impact than frigid temperatures, it is no less true that spending large amounts of resources on anti-shooting measures carry with them their own costs.
Now, in the US, many organizations, both public and private have elected to devote sizable amounts of resources to security. But none of them deny that there is an opportunity cost to doing so.
Indeed, opponents of added security in schools have been quick to point out the costs of more security measures.
And yet, proponents of more gun control act as if there are no opportunity costs to these measures. In reality, of course, the costs of enforcing government prohibitions can be very high, both in terms of tax dollars and costs imposed upon otherwise law abiding citizens. The drug war has made this quite clear. In the absence of individual gun ownership, professional security will become more necessary, and in many cases more costly. This imposes a real cost on citizens, especially on those who cannot afford professional security. Relying on the police for protection, of course, has been shown to be unwise at best.
Many observers will still point out that even a small number of school shootings is too many. That’s true enough, but when the multi-decade trend is downward, it would hardly be honest to attempt to frame the current situation as a “crisis.” Indeed the challenge should be to discover what factors have led to the decline in violence, and act accordingly.
Justin Fox adds more broadly:
There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about rising crime. For good reason: Violent crime and murder were in fact up in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016. Early indications are that crime rates fell in 2017, though. 1 And the really big crime story of our time remains how much it has fallen in this country over the past quarter-century.
The blue line in the above chart comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Crime in the United States reports, the 2016 edition of which came out last September. The gray line is from the less-well-known National Crime Victimization Survey of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from which 2016 data was released in December. 2 As you can see, the BJS data — based in 2016 on a survey of 134,690 households — shows an even sharper drop than the data the FBI collects from law enforcement agencies.
The great crime decline is not the result, then, of police departments fudging numbers or victims deciding it’s pointless to report crimes. If anything, recent FBI crime data is probably more reflective of actual crime incidence than that of several decades ago, meaning that today’s violent crime rate is probably not really more than twice that of the early 1960s. Since 1965, Gallup has been asking Americans, “Is there any area near where you live — that is, within a mile — where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” In October 2017, just 30 percent of respondents said yes, tying an all-time low. Then there’s the FBI data on murders, which tend not to go unreported.
The murder rate in 2014 was lower than at any time since the FBI started keeping track in 1960. That is … remarkable. In his illuminating new book “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence,” New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey takes things a few steps further:
Because of shoddy data prior to 1960, it is impossible to know with certainty the exact rate of crime and violence in the first five decades of the twentieth century or at any earlier point in the history of the country. But the most persuasive research from historical mortality records concludes that the homicide rate was likely substantially higher in the first half of the twentieth century than it was in the second half. In fact, the prevalence of murder has been falling, albeit with spikes and troughs, throughout the country’s history. If the historical trends in murder derived from mortality records are roughly accurate, and all indications suggest that they are, then we are led to a startling conclusion: 2014 was not only the safest year of the past five decades, it was one of the safest years in U.S. history.
To repeat: Violent crime was possibly near or at an all-time low in the U.S. in 2014, and while it’s up a bit since then, it is still quite low by historical standards. Yet except for in 2000 and 2001, most of the Americans contacted by Gallup’s pollsters — usually in the same surveys in which a majority reported feeling safe walking around their neighborhoods alone at night — have voiced the opinion that crime is on the rise nationally:
The respondents to these polls aren’t totally clueless: The percentage of those who thought crime was getting worse fell sharply in the 1990s as crime rates fell sharply, and bottomed out in 2000 and 2001 just as the great crime decline began to flatten out. And yes, violent crime did rise in 2015 and 2016. But there’s clearly an unwarrantedly negative tilt. It takes a lot to convince Americans that crime isn’t getting worse.
Why is that? Part of it is probably hometown bias. Americans think their local public school is great but public schools in general are terrible, and they appear to think similarly about crime. Then there’s the way the media conveys information about crime. More Americans get their news from local television broadcasts than any other source, and the unofficial motto of local TV news is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Finally, politicians have on occasion been known play up fears of crime because they think it can get them votes or help them pass legislation.
It seems obvious that one thing schools should be teaching children is to not make decisions based on inaccurate information, even if making decisions based on facts and logic instead of emotion is an impossible mission anymore.
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The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1960:
Today in 1965, Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds because he wanted to continue playing the blues, while the other members wanted to sell records, as in …
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1967, the Beatles hired Sounds, Inc. for horn work:
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Jonah Goldberg writes a serious syndicated column, and a less serious online column, The G-File.
Goldberg first wrote in USA Today anticipating Wednesday’s walkout in schools across the country:
Later this month, high school kids will hold big demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere to demand gun control in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, Fla. That’s fine by me. I disagree with the thrust of what they want to do as a matter of policy, but it’s a free country.
My problem is with the resurgence of an old American tradition of celebrating young people as inherently wiser and more moral than adults. There are really three problems with the fetishization of youth in politics. First, it’s based on a faulty premise: that young people have a radically or uniquely superior insight into political affairs.
This is an ancient confusion. It usually hinges on misinterpreting the fact that young people see the world with fresh eyes, as it were.
And it’s true that young people have a gift for cutting through the false pieties and polite fictions of modern life, as when a nephew points out how much weight you’ve gained. Even the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes is a story about a kid too ignorant to know when to placate a king’s vanity.
But the simple fact is that young people are not, as a group, better informed, wiser, smarter or even more enlightened than older people. This is a fact of science and social science alike. We are born ignorant of the world we live in and only lose that ignorance over time.
Think about what you knew and understood at half your current age. Were you smarter then? Wiser? Why assume it works differently for anyone else?
“To all the generations before us,” Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland survivors recently said on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, “we sincerely accept your apology. And we appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f—ed up.”
I get the passion. I get the rage and trauma behind it. But this nonsense is as pernicious as it is obnoxious (I’ve apologized for nothing, by the way, have you?). It’s also not true.
Young people today, and particularly young Americans, should be brimming with gratitude for the world they are inheriting. Lest you think this a cranky right-wing sentiment, let me align myself with Barack Obama: “If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn’t know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be, you’d choose today.”
Kasky is standing on a soapbox built with the toil of previous generations and he’s taking a sledgehammer to it — because he doesn’t know better.
My hunch is that a great many people who take offense at my criticism do so either because of Kasky’s traumatic experience or because they agree with him — if not about the bankruptcy of the past then about his anti-gun agenda.
And that brings me to the second problem with the glorification of youth: It invariably involves powerful adults finding kids who agree with them on some issue and then claiming that all young people think this way (and then hiding behind the myth that we must listen to “the children”). If these Parkland kids came out for concealed-carry or arming teachers, you can be sure MSNBC would not be touting them in commercials.
But the most galling thing about adult partisans hiding behind kids is that it amounts to a kind of power-worship. “I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong,” the author Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times, “because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history.” Never mind that factually, this is balderdash.
Young people change their minds about lots of things as they get older, and historians rarely lock in the views of young people a few decades later. This is also ethically bankrupt because it assumes that whatever kids today believe will be right because the victors write the history, so we should just surrender to the youngest mob.
Democracy depends on arguments that are not contingent on your age. Lots of kids don’t understand that, but grown-ups are supposed to.
Then he wrote in his G-File about said column:
There were many dumb reactions. Of course, this is to be expected. As King Leonidas might say if he were the ruler of a social-media platform, “This is Twitter!”
Still it’s been a rather remarkable experience watching people freak out over such an obviously correct point.
In fact, I thought I inoculated myself from the more ridiculous accusations in advance. But alas, what I thought was a feature of my column was for some its fatal flaw. …
I’ve been writing about the inanity and jackassery of generational stereotyping and youth politics for literally 25 years, going all the way back to when I was a young twentysomething. But, apparently, that argument cannot be made independent of the Parkland kids because, in this moment, they are speaking for all youth and therefore, thanks to the transitive property of generational numinosity, any criticism of young people qua young people is “attacking” the Gun Control Youth League. Never mind that young people are as divided on the issue of gun control as everyone else.
It’s a funny analogue to the crap I get from some Trump supporters who think that I’ve changed since his rise. I’ve been against sexual depravity, protectionism, populism, industrial policy, orange-tinted skin, executive overreach, etc. for decades. Then Trump comes along, I keep saying the same things, and, suddenly, I get all of this “What happened to you?!”
So let me try this a different way: Nothing in the passages that follow is in any way, shape, or form negative commentary or invidious insinuation about the Parkland students. They are right about everything, no matter the subject.
I would even stipulate that no youths from Florida are ever wrong about anything and that their sagacity and good conduct should never be doubted or gainsaid. But, then again, I can only ask so much willing disbelief from my readers. Regardless, seriously, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Parkland kids or even the issue of gun control.
Let’s establish a baseline. I assume we can all agree that everyone is born remarkably dumb. Ever try to talk about the causes of the First World War with a newborn? So frustrating.
There are few things more settled in science than the fact that humans start out not very bright or informed and that this condition only wears off over time — i.e., as they get older.
Only slightly more controversial: Young people tend to be more emotional than grown-ups. This is true of babies, who will cry about the silliest things (hence the word, “crybaby”). But it’s also true of teenagers.
Again, this is not string theory. We know these things. And the idea that I must provide empirical evidence for such a staggeringly obvious point is hilarious to me.
Aside from all the social science, medical science, novels, plays, poems, musicals, and movies that explore this fact, there is another source we can consult on this: ourselves.
Every not-currently-young person reading this “news”letter has one thing in common: We were all young once.
This is what I mean when I say that “youth politics are the laziest form of identity politics.” Say what you will for racial-identity politics, there’s at least a superficial case that such identities are immutable. I can never be a black woman. And before everyone gets clever, even if I dropped a lot of coin on cosmetic surgery, I can never claim to know what it’s like to be a black woman.
You know what I can claim, though? Knowing what it’s like to be young. Sure, I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be young in 2018, but as the father of a 15-year-old, I’m not wholly ignorant on the topic either. On the other hand, my 15-year-old has no clue what it was like to be young in the 1980s.
And that’s why youth politics are such a lazy form of identity politics. (It’s also why generational stereotypes are lazy.) Here’s a news flash for you: There was no “Greatest Generation.” The dudes who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy: badasses and heroes, to a man. The dudes back home in the drunk tank on D-Day? Not so much.
This is what I hate about all forms of identity politics. It’s an effort to get credit or authority based upon an accident of birth. The whole point of liberalism (the real kind) is the idea that people are supposed to be judged on the basis of their own merits, not as representatives of some class or category. Of course, one needn’t be absolutist about this. A little pride in your culture or ethnicity won’t do any harm. But reducing individuals simply to some abstract category is the very definition of bigotry.
There is no transitive property to age. If a 17-year-old cures cancer, that’s fantastic. But the 17-year-old who spends his days huffing glue and playing Call of Duty is still a loser. I’m a Gen Xer. I take literally zero pride in the good things people my age do. I also have zero shame about the terrible things people my age do. Why? Because age is as dumb a thing as height or hair color to hitch your self-esteem to. What kind of loser looks back on a life of mediocrity and sloth and says to himself, “Well at least other people in my age cohort did great things!”?
And yet, we constantly invest special virtue in young people. As Socrates explained to Meno, there are no special virtues for young people. There are simply virtues. If a young person says that 2 + 2 = 4, that’s no more right or wrong than if an old person says so. The bravery of one 18-year-old does not negate the cowardice of another 18-year-old.
And that gets me to the next of my supposedly outrageous points: Older people know more than younger people. I’ve been stunned by the number of people offended by this. A lot of folks are getting hung up on the fact that young people know more about some things than older people. Fair enough. The average young person knows more about today’s youth culture and gadgets than the average fogey. My daughter can identify the noise coming out of my car radio. When I was a kid, it was running joke that grown-ups couldn’t figure out how to make the VCR stop flashing “12:00.” It never dawned on me that knowing how to fix that problem meant I knew more about politics than my dad.
This isn’t just a point about technological know-how or public policy. There’s an emotional narcissism to youth. Because a rich cocktail of hormones courses through teenagers’ still-developing brains, young people think they are the first people to experience a range of emotions. But we’ve all experienced those emotions. It’s just that when you experience them for the first time, it’s easy to think it’s the first time anyone has experienced such emotions. The first time you fall in love — or think you’ve fallen in love — as a teenager is a wildly intoxicating thing. And there’s nothing more infuriating than when old people tell you, “It’s just a phase.” That, however, doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Indeed, “You just don’t get it!” might as well be the motto of youth.
My objection to youth politics is simply one facet of my objection to identity politics — but it’s also a part of my objection to populism. That’s because youth politics is a form of populism. It claims that passion and the group are more important than reason and the individual. It is the passion of the crowd. And when grown-ups bow before the rising generation, it is a form of power-worship. “Children are the future!” is literally true in the sense that they will be alive after the rest of us are dead. But that does not absolve the rest of us from our responsibilities. Nor does it negate arguments that young people don’t want to hear.
Liberals love to talk about root causes. If you assign blame for the Parkview school shooting to anyone or anything that meets your political worldview (guns, violent video games, inadequate mental health care, the ______ization of society, etc.) besides the shooter, then you also have to grant that the Parkview students who bullied, or bully, other students or merely shun them also deserve some blame. Tell that to a young gun control proponent and see what happens.
Someone (read here to try to discern whom) once observed that if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by 40 you have no brain. We’re hearing from the liberals.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 