#interbellum generation

When I was perusing the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion group on Facebook the other day, Nightvid Cole posted something that really blew me away:

When a parent lashes out by hitting a child in response to something the child says, it is "corporal punishment", but when a child does exactly the same to a parent for exactly the same reason, it is a "temper tantrum". This doublethink is precisely what is so wrong about the concept of "maturity" -- it is essentially defined to pre-suppose that the parent or adult is objectively correct no matter what simply because they are the adult. Therefore, using "immaturity" as an excuse for depriving the young of rights is often just circular reasoning in disguise. If this example seems silly, note that a very similar double standard has been used to deny teens the right to refuse medical treatment, as for example in the case of Cassandra C., the Connecticut teen who lost the legal battle to avoid forced chemotherapy. She was considered "immature" by the judge, largely because she ran away from home to avoid forced chemotherapy. But the entire idea that "running away from home" is "immature" rather than "assertive" when faced with a forced invasion of basic bodily autonomy, is the same type of self-serving adultist doublethink as the distinction between "corporal punishment" and "temper tantrums", except at a much higher level.

This is why I think that youth liberationists should question the concept of "maturity" rather than simply arguing that all or some youth are "mature". When you live in a world where you are forced to live by decisions made on your behalf without your input, it is only natural that you would sometimes behave in ways that are outside the bounds of the social norms that were put in place by the oppressor class. Using that as an attempt to justify unequal rights is one giant Catch 22 -- and the individuals doing this are guilty of participating in a dehumanizing disregard for the position of the oppressed.

Now, this is a great insight, and I'd like to discuss this some more. Circular arguments are grist for the mill of ageists. They will argue, for instance, both "You shouldn't have any legal rights because you're still in K-12 school", and "You need to attend school because you don't have any legal rights". Or the variation: "Teens need to stay in school because they don't have the life experience to choose otherwise", and "Teens don't have enough life experience because they're still in school". They will tell their children both "You have to follow my rules because you live in my house", and "You have to live in my house because you have to follow my rules". They'll say, "Children shouldn't swear, because profanity is inappropriate", but also "Those words are inappropriate because children might hear and learn them". (If the only thing wrong with those words is that children might learn them, rather than something inherently evil about those words, then what's the big deal if children learn and use the F-word or the SH-word?) Some will even argue "We need compulsory education because some parents are abusive fascists who try to indoctrinate their kids with KKK values", but also "Parents need to have the power to make whatever strict rules for their kids they feel are appropriate, because otherwise how would they make sure their kids go to school and do their homework?"

If you google the word "immature", the dictionary that pops up will provide to you the definition: "having or showing an emotional or intellectual development appropriate to someone younger". When lexicographers are forced to find a definition for "immature", all they come up with is acting the way younger people act and thinking the way younger people think.

Firstly, it is awfully presumptuous to say that something is "bad" or undesirable because younger people do or believe it. Today, teens are less likely than fiftysomethings to be homophobic, or even to believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. A 2018 Pew poll found that Millennials (born 1979-2004) are less likely than Xers (born 1964-1978), Jonesers (born 1958-1963), Boomers (born 1943-1957), or Silents (born 1925-1942) to consider global warming unsupported by science, or merely natural rather than anthropogenic. (The Pew Poll used somewhat different generational boundaries from me, defining Silents as 1928-1945, Boomers as 1946-1964, Xers as 1965-1980, Millennials as 1981-1996, and "Generation Z" as starting in 1997. I'm not down with breaking late Millennials off as "Gen Z" -- the real change starts in 2005 with the birth of those too young to remember life before the Crash of 2008, which changed the zeitgeist more fundamentally than 9/11, and even then the name "Generation Z" is derivative of "Generation X" and then "Generation Y" (a much worse name than "Millennials"; "Generation Y" sounds like a linearly progressing extreme version of Generation X). I call the kids born 2005 to today the Fifth World Generation, because most of them have their first memories of the world during the Fifth World, as per the Mayan calendar.)

In fact, if one looks at the generational conflicts over the course of history, one sees the pattern that it has been the older generation that was in the wrong and the younger generation that was in the right, for everything from the Vietnam War (Boomers vs. the Greatest Generation (born 1911-1924)) to the emancipation of African-American slaves (the Transcendental Generation (born 1792-1821) vs. the Republican Generation (born 1742-1766)). When kids are 4, 5, 6, they have the ability to question authority and think positively of other people, without becoming leery of outgroups. Thirtysomethings, twentysomethings, teens, and even children have led new social movements, including such movements of today as Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, Antifa, the Battle for Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, the Global Climate Strike, the Free the Music movement, Boobquake, and, yes, the youth rights movement.

Youth rights opponents like to use the argument that youth have brains that have "not finished developing", but if they believe that, then shouldn't they support the ideas that under25s have, since their brains are supposedly still malleable enough to be open to new ideas whereby people can see injustices and systemic problems to which previous generations were blind? When the Interbellum Generation (born 1901-1910) was young, they wore T-shirts as outerwear and their young women smoked (smoking was viewed as a male activity at the time, and society believed T-shirts should be undershirts only). Interbellumers had sit-down strikes to fight for the labor reforms of the Great Depression, and often became Communists, socialists, or anarchists. When the Interbellum Generation became middle-aged, they were still accepting of women smoking, T-shirts, and leftist economics, but the Old Left couldn't handle the even newer innovations of the New Left: gay rights, cohabitation, interracial dating and marriage, miniskirts. Today the same Boomers who were, and are still, perfectly fine with blue jeans, Black boys dating White girls, the Rolling Stones, and couples living together before marriage are shuddering at music piracy, sexting, JUUL, suffrage for 16-year-olds, and non-binary teens who ask to be called "they" or "zie".

Secondly, this kind of circular thinking and concern with "maturity" and "life experience" creates a vicious circle. Because teens are believed by society to lack maturity, current laws abrogate the right to make most decisions, even simple decisions like what clothes kids may wear, to the parents, hold parents responsible for keeping their kids safe, and even punish parents for their minor children's misdeeds (punishing Person A for the wrongdoing of Person B is unspeakably wrong, but that's a topic for another day). Because of this, parents then say, "I'm responsible for my child until s/he is an adult", and become very circumspect about whom they allow their kid to see and where they allow their kid to go. They micromanage what courses their kid takes at school and how their kid spends his or her time. This helicopter parenting then creates learned helplessness and infantilized kids ("learned helplessness" and "infantilization" are two hot words within the youth rights community). These helpless overgrown babies are then made into Exhibit A as evidence that today's teens "aren't mature enough" to be trusted with even basic and essential "adult" rights, like, oh, getting vaccinated even though their parents don't want them to. Reasoning in circles correlates with vicious circles.

Thirdly, it is too easy to fall into the fallacy I call "blaming the rebel". Ageist adults will see a teen, or a whole generation of teens, filled with angst or righteous indignation about school uniforms, or a curfew, or gestapo parents who won't let their sons be (platonic) friends with girls, and then said ageists will latch on to the emotionally charged rage, the righteous tone, the subsequent disobedience which they've come to believe is always "irresponsible", and they'll argue, "If teens react like this to something adults believe is in their best interest, these hysterical, petulant, irresponsible kids don't deserve rights".

But what if those restrictions on teens didn't exist, and teens enjoyed all the same legal rights and socially recognized freedoms as 35-year-olds (recall the vicious circle mentioned above)? Then that angst and those "petulant" behaviors would not exist, and there would go ageist adults' argument for why teens don't deserve rights. In his Scientific American article "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein explains how for most of human history and in hunter-gatherer societies into the present day, people Anglophones would call "teen-agers" were simply young members of the adult community; juvenile delinquency and teen angst are nonexistent problems in those societies. Epstein writes:

Even more significant, a series of long-term studies set in motion in the 1980s by anthropologists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Harvard University suggests that teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the introduction of certain Western influences, especially Western-style schooling, television programs and movies. Delinquency was not an issue among the Inuit people of Victoria Island, Canada, for example, until TV arrived in 1980. By 1988 the Inuit had created their first permanent police station to try to cope with the new problem.

As a matter of fact, the uppity behavior of young people ias been used before as an argument against affording teens new rights that people now take for granted. Back in the sixties and seventies, when Boomers were fighting to get the voting age lowered from 21 to 18 because of the draft in Vietnam, the old guard leveraged the unrest among college students as an argument that 18-year-olds weren't mature enough to vote. Stuart Goldstein, who fought to lower the voting age in New Jersey to 18, said: "It was kind of an uphill battle for us trying to convince people young people were responsible, because it was an era when, from a national political point of view, the national leaders were pitting young against old. Our thing was, 'We're going to try and work within the system.' There was all this tumult going on across the country. We didn't think that would help us convince people that they should lower the voting age." And yet 18-year-olds got the vote not long thereafter, and have been using it well.

Blaming the rebel has been done not only to youth, but also to other oppressed groups throughout history. In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a physician who practiced in antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana, posited a mental disorder called drapetomania. He identified drapetomania as a mental illness whereby Black slaves would run away from their masters, attempting to become free. Cartwright wrote that this was the result of masters who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals". (That line makes me flinch, because it reminds me a little too much of the "Be a parent, not a pal" line directed towards permissive parents today.) This was an argument levied against granting freedom to African-Americans, as if it were innate to the Black race to "irresponsibly" disobey. Today, virtually all Americans realize that fleeing slavery was only a perfectly proper response to humans being legally treated as someone's property, and would find the idea that Black people are somehow undeserving of the right to be free by virtue of their Blackness to be preposterous.

Also, are you really so sure we would not see rage, uprising, even tantrums, if an age restriction were imposed on Boomers today? Howe & Strauss attribute to Boomers a tendency to be idealistic, impassioned, quick to anger, emotional, easily outraged. A recent comment on the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion group put it so well: "If all age restrictions were applied at both ends of standard 'adulthood' we would see much less of this shit. Boomers would fume if they couldn't buy alcohol after age 52."

Would this fuming be proof that sexagenarians were unworthy of the right to drink, vote, drive, sign contracts, or make their own medical decisions?