Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Vintage Original) by Neil Howe & William Strauss

Author:Neil Howe & William Strauss [Howe, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-15T14:00:00+00:00

At Columbine High School, we will have zero tolerance for cruelty, harassment, excessive teasing, discrimination, violence, and intimidation.

—Frank DeAngelis, principal, Columbine High, at its reopening

School shootings are rising because of cliques at school.

—Amanda, 13

And that's not all. From 1991 to 1997, 30 percent fewer high school students reported ever bringing a weapon to school, 20 percent fewer said they got in fights, 25 percent fewer skipped school because they felt unsafe, and 50 percent fewer feared being mugged, raped, or shot. In the fall of 1998, before Columbine, three times as many students in grades 3 through 12 believed that school violence was going down rather than up. In urban schools, the ratio was five to one.

Although Millennial kids, on the whole, are feeling safer these days both in and out of school, they have acquired a special dread of mass gun killings, for much the same reason many people fear airline travel: When it happens, it's horrible, spectacular, the lead on the nightly news, the cover on all the newsmagazines. Why has this crime suddenly become a Millennial trademark? Each side of the culture wars has its own preferred explanation—on one side, guns and hate; on the other, a jaundiced culture and derelict parents. There's some truth to all these explanations, certainly. Yes, many adults today keep a lot of firepower hanging around their homes without much supervision. And yes, the Harris-Klebold goal of being portrayed in a Spielberg-Tarantino movie does have a jarring ‘90s ring to it. But the question worth asking is why, when other teen crimes are ebbing, these peculiarly horrible incidents—at lonesboro, Pearl, West Paducah, Fayetteville, Springfield, Littleton, Fort Gibson— keep happening.

Media hype is one answer, but some other patterns are discernible. Unlike the bulk of the more urban, bicoastal school killings of the early ‘90s, these have been committed by Caucasian males in small to middle-sized towns, mostly along a swath from the central South through the southern Great Plains. Rather than one youth gang attacking another, these Millennial-era crimes were instead acts of rage against the well-behaving mass of the student body by loners who despise popular kids and are teased by the “in” cliques. In the Gen-X era, loners like these would have felt less pressure to conform, not so out of place or so motivated (as Harris and Klebold were) to pull off a crime whose horrendous scale would forever keep them in the pantheon of wax-museum evildoers.

Columbine, to a great extent, was a couple of punks raging against the dominant jock-prep culture. [Today's kids] place a strong emphasis on teamwork and belonging. Punk values emphasize rejection of the mainstream and a pride in not belonging. When Xer culture was dominant, the punks could make a point of not belonging, and yet perversely they were the dominant clique of the generation. By striving not to belong, they belonged. With the culture shifting, the rebels are suddenly being left behind. They are becoming dated and old.

—Bob Butler

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