Virginia Tech

I've had whack-jobs in my classes like that. I thought for sure they would bring a gun some day. Now that I think of it, there were kids at my undergrad college who were very, very disturbed. I remember a friend's roommate, Elena, who night after night slept in a cave of newspapers she made on her bed. Poor girl. There was just no reaching her.

At VT, I'm struck that the teacher who really was the hero of the moment (at least the one I've heard about) was a Holocaust survivor. Now that's someone who knows about fear and danger. A person from a totally different world than the students. I think it says a lot that it was only he who, instead of shrinking from it and trying to hide, stood up when he should have. (See Mark Steyn on this, too.)

A friend of mine said she feared that there is SO MUCH of this kind of stuff going on. She's right. I don't believe it personally, but I sympathize with my sister-in-law's rantings about this being "End Times." Of course, every generation in almost every age has had good reason to think the same (that's why I'm not especially worried now). But it troubles me nonetheless to think about sending little ones into the Madness.

My question when it comes to thinking about this isn't "why can't we all get along?" Rather, it's "where are the adults?" I think many individuals, and the culture as a whole, have abdicated the role they ought be playing: the role of the grown-up. This is the one who says, without apologizing, this is the ideal for behavior (even if most real people can't live up to it), even if it intrudes on your personal freedom. It's the one who says "hey, there are limits to your self-gratification." And "I'm sorry, but there are limits to what's "okay" in terms of behavior." The one who says, "It's not all about you."

Part of the trouble now is that one of the most childish, self-centered, self-gratified, boundary-defying, limit-vilifying generations ever is now in the role where the grown-ups are supposed to be. The defiance they've congratulated themselves for since they were teens, and the narcissism by which they justified it, are having serious consequences in the culture.

An example: Someone I work with at CDC seemed amused yesterday when she mentioned that the population segment with the fastest-rising incidence of new HIV infections is seniors. There were lots of suppressed giggles, and then someone summed it off by laughing (and I quote), "Ha ha! I guess they're not worried about getting pregnant, so they're just having fun!"

These are our rising seniors. Imagine what it will be like, just a few years hence, when the Me Generation goes to the home! It's all kind of humorous, I admit, but there's a reason it's funny: it's that we don't expect our seniors to act, well, like horny teenagers. We expect them to be upright and moral. In a very real but unacknowledged sense, we need them to set the moral boundaries for the rest of us. In other words, we expect them to be the guard rails at the cliff's edge. But if they don't fulfill that role, what then?

Here's the point -- the perceived culture (to the extent it's a coherent whole, and it isn't) may or may not have have needed some revision way back when, but it's equally true that the whole celebrated rebellion we grew up in the shadow of needed that solid civilization more than it would ever admit. It took what was good and real and benevolent about the culture it was rebelling against for granted, as if what was good in, say, deferring to one's elders couldn't be lost or didn't exist in the first place.

I call that the "Push-Off Principle" (not a perfect name -- I'm still looking for a better one). What it refers to is the phenomenon where one group or idea or ideology both "pushes off" from an existing standard while also, without realizing it, taking the indestructibility of the standard's benefits for granted. The upshot is like revising a good but imperfect manuscript by throwing out your whole computer -- you get rid of the bad all right, but you also lose the good as well as the hardware that made revising possible in the first place.