Do Today's Kids Have It Tough?

Has today's generation of kids somehow had it tougher, been exposed to more violence, somehow become more "hardened," than prior generations?

That's the thesis of a front page article in today's Washington Post, which features suburban moms and kids recounting the horrors of the current generation, culminating in last week's massacre at Virginia Tech. As one mom tells it with respect to her 15-year-old son, first it was Columbine, then 9/11, then the Iraq War, then Virginia Tech. An Annandale High student throws in the days of the Sniper scare in Washington.

Somehow, all this brought out our curmudgeonly side. The current generation of kids--ours included--is incredibly pampered and sheltered. Somehow, the adults of our generation--who, it turns out went through a lot more violence and danger than our kids, but managed to be resilient and determined--have passed on fear and anxiety to our heirs.

The Curmudgeon was born in 1958. In 1963, JFK was murdered, the back of his head blown off in television images repeated over and over. His assasin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was also promptly shot in televised images. In 1964-65 we watched as police beat the living daylights out of civil rights workers, unleashed dogs on them and knocked them down with fire hoses. Every night we were treated to the latest images of violence from Viet Nam, including a naked girl running down a dirt road after stripping her napalm-burned clothes off, or an alleged Viet Cong spy being shot in the head.

Yet none of that could even begin to compare the ugly violence of 1968. RFK, gunned down. Martin Luther King, murdered. Riots across every major city in the U.S. Watts burning. The Curmudgeon remembers going to a neighbor hood "curfew party" in our home town of Columbia, SC as the black neighborhoods across town seethed with anger. Black power at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. In Orangeburg, SC, three black students were killed, and 30 wounded when state police officers opened fire on their protest at South Carolina State College. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was four days of riots and police in riot gear. I recall my older cousin calling from Chicago, crying, after being gassed in one of the protests.

By then, thousands of young American men were dying in Viet Nam each month. Everyone knew someone who had been killed, or had been drafted to go over.

Things didn't get much better. In 1970, when the Curmudgeon started riding a school bus to a formerly all-black junior high school as part of the local court-ordered desegration plan, race riots throughout the district shut down schools for several days. I witnessed a police officer, who'd come to my school to pick up his daughter after vicious fighting broke out, as he maced a dozen students--13-14 year olds--as a large crowd gathered behind him shouting insults such as "pig".

In 1972, as the Curmudgeon entered high school, terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes in Munich as the world watched in horror. Police and National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State, killing many. An angry local kid brought a shotgun to school one day--fortunately, he was disarmed before harming anyone.

Behind all this loomed the very real threat of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. We were deploying ever more nuclear weapons in formats designed to "survive" a first strike from the Red Menace so we'd be able to devastate them just as well as they could devastate us.

And yet, through all this, our parents let us be regular kids. Imagine this: we rode in the front seat of cars with no air bags, no antilock brakes and only a lap seatbelt--a newfangled contraption many ignored--for protection. We could drive at age 15, drink at age 18.

The Curmudgeon would go on hiking and biking trips with other teenagers in high school with no cell phone, no bike helmet and often no itinerary--our parents having only a vague notion as to where we were! We rode bicycles all over Columbia, sometimes going to the local Krispy Kreme (in a questionable part of town) at night to get the fresh, hot doughnuts.

And get this: we walked to school, every day (until we mercifully got a bike) without any parents shepherding us. No one in our neighborhood today would think of letting their child walk to school by himself.

When bad news happened, we weren't sheltered from it. You couldn't be. Back then, there were four television stations: NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS. There were no 24-hours kids' stations--Disney, Nickolodeon, Cartoon Network. If you were watching Saturday afternoon cartoons and something bad happened, like three astronauts burning up in their rocket as it sat on the launch pad, the networks would interrupt with a bulletin and there'd you'd be, watching raptly. But then, things would soon get back to normal--there were no 24-hour news networks to feed with non-stop coverage. Life would go on.

Yes, the current generation of youth have been exposed to some violent times. To be sure, 9/11 was, to the Curmudgeon, far more shocking than anything we faced growing up. But it was not worse than what happened in WWII, which our parents endured. The Greatest Generation, as they have become known, was not afraid. They passed their fearlessness on to us. If only we could do the same for our children.