The-Sandy-Hook-Slaughter-and-Lost-Young-Men

The Sandy Hook Slaughter and Lost Young Men

Why is it always men? Well, no – not men. Males. To call them men seems an undeserved compliment. One may think that the choice of noun to describe the fundamental condition of these wretched souls who end up as mass murderers is unimportant when yet another one of them has killed twenty-eight people at a school, most of them children. Actually, it’s a significant matter. Until recent years it didn’t occur to anyone, for the most part, to deny an adult male the complimentary designation of “man.” Indeed, many who arguably did not particularly deserve it enjoyed receiving it as a matter of course. The wife beater who happened to land a 50-pound fish? What a man.

Was the Newton, Connecticut, school mass murderer a man? Many on this December morning are surely labeling him a punk, a loser, a psycho, a rotten apple, a creep. The question of manhood is more complicated than ever because two basic definitions now exist, at least in American society. To traditional thinkers, a man is courageous, competitive, aggressive and protective, and if not the strong, invincible head of his house it’s only because he hasn’t yet married. Other minds reject that as a total anachronism grounded partly on early history of hunters and gatherers and partly in outright artificiality and socially entrenched power, clung to by males with little but anatomy to recommend them. To them, a real man shows emotion, pitches in considerably with domestic work and is unthreatened by a wife whose pay is higher than his. Thoughtful and objective observers are wedded to neither paradigm. From the universe of economic vicissitudes, social shifts and demographic evolution they just try to analyze evolving gender roles and characteristics and resulting conditions. In 2012 it has been clear for a few years that the dominant and troubling condition arising from social change is the decline of men in social and economic position. Neither this writer nor anyone else is qualified to say that this condition caused the horrifying, tragic slaughter of school children. However, the possibility of that causal relationship deserves far more attention than does the issue of gun control. The weapons used in Newtown were a tool, not a cause.

In 2011 a book by Hanna Rosin, The End of Men, came out, and received the considerable attention one might expect in the case of a serious study with such a title. Prominent commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks discussed Rosin’s thesis that plunging economic prospects for males, along with their sinking proportion of earned college degrees are due to failure of men to adapt to a changing world (see link below). Observers have long held, Brooks pointed out, that steadily decreasing male achievement is traceable to an evolving economy that prizes certain human qualities and proclivities in which women are strong and men deficient. In fact, both theories are probably very near the mark. Margaret Mitchell’s lovable character Mammy, in Gone With the Wind, cautioned Scarlett O’Hara, “You’re smart about dollars and cents; that’s a man’s way-a being smart. But you ain’t smart about folks.” The gratuitous taciturnity that some boys adopt at young ages would seem proof that being smart about folks is not a natural male strength. Alas, it is a highly desirable strength, not to say an essential, in a post-industrial, advanced economy.

Adaptability to new situations has been required throughout history, at many times and in many places, usually involving factors unrelated to gender. Immigrants are an obvious group of people who have no choice but to adapt. Typically, immigrants want to adapt. “Men,” David Brooks suggested, “are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one.” Like others who had held all the power and position in their world (like the English Bostonians who defiantly named the Back Bay streets after places in England when Boston was filling up with “undesirable” immigrants) many men can accept neither the loss of unearned privilege nor the loss of formerly good-paying jobs that are not coming back. Waiting at a red light, I frequently see such men through the windshield of my late-model Jeep. Alone and manifestly lacking in both psychic vitality and material prosperity, they fix me and my car with a look that I don’t think is hard to interpret: One of those women who have what I’m supposed to have.

Complicating the very plausible theory of male adaptability deficit is the fact that very young males, like Adam Lanza, who killed himself after breaking the hearts of over two dozen families in Connecticut, don’t remember Father Knows Best, or any other artifact of a time when male supremacy across the board was unquestioned. Today’s young men couldn’t be very nostalgic for 1960. So there is something else going on. Although one views this possibility with distaste and even fear, it almost seems as if human males by nature have a need that human females fortunately lack: to be assured that whatever happens, they cannot fall too far in life because virtually all the members of the opposite sex are beneath them and will stay there. This is not a ridiculous suggestion. Throughout history women all over the world have served collectively as a kind of beneficent platform on which men were able to confidently stand. “Behind every successful man there is a woman” is (or was) a well-known maxim. Nobody quite knows whether it was a joke, a social observation or a proverb. In any event it’s an old saw whose basis in fact may have very serious ramifications indeed. Society needs – and a self-described civil society should have – protection from a rifle-wielding young male who thinks (if that is the right word) that his personal distress at not being king of the mountain confers license to violently take the lives of children, who – to make this even more enraging and intolerable – had no relationship to him.

What to do about this (“this” meaning the appallingly sad prospect of another massacre before too long) may be less of a problematic question than how to do it. You can’t nab a young adult male on the street and inform him that, because he looks troubled and has a history of social awkwardness, he’s going to undergo treatments and then be transformed into a sane, responsible person with good family ties, friends and a paying job in which he can take some pride. But it seems quite obvious that something very like that is needed. We badly need ways to ensure that no more pathetic young males turn into mass murderers, and new gun control laws will help only in the sense that a suicidal person may postpone committing suicide because he can’t find a bridge to jump from.

Starting with parents, boys should be taught in no uncertain terms that skulking out of the room instead of politely saying “hello, Mrs. Jones,” when a visitor comes is not acceptable and won’t be tolerated. Some of the boys that “boys will be” have grown up to be criminally anti-social. In addition, parents should see the red flag inherent in a son’s behavior that is characterized by social isolation, excessive time spent on violent video games, and general withdrawal. No one truly wants to be alone and withdrawn as a permanent condition. Lifelong we are all desperately in need of love, approval, friendship and a reasonable degree of closeness in family relations.

School policies should include the requirement that all students participate in the social and extra-curricula life of the school. If a student is not theatrically inclined, then maybe sports – but something. When students typically join groups, are more or less gregarious, and do better academically because of their more well-rounded routine, it should be obvious that the few outsiders, the non-participants, need help. Nor should “flunking out” be tolerated. Policy should require that failing students get mandatory help that eventually yields results. Moreover, legal permission to quit school at 16 is a mistake and should be abolished. There is nothing particularly draconian about requiring children to finish high school.

Families should ride herd on their young male members who are unemployed, floundering, taking on slovenly character and showing signs of giving up. They can come up with ideas, projects and possible solutions.

It is impossible, and in general not desirable, to change the fundamental fabric of America in which is embedded the worship of individualism, of going one’s own way. What we need, although I don’t know of anyone who could devise it, is the ability to prevent “going one’s own way” from turning into desperate loneliness and its possible deleterious consequences.

In the television news coverage of the terrible tragedy in Connecticut some individuals interviewed tried to speak about it but they “didn’t have the words.” Well, neither has anyone else. Because there aren’t any. But we do have the capability, in a country of truly unlimited resourcefulness, to try harder to prevent the neglectful, if unintended, creation of miserable young males severely divorced from society and completely uncoupled from any sense of morality or obligation to other human beings.

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Brooks-As-women-learn-to-adapt-men-are-falling-3857480.php