Teenage Wasteland
The consequences of extending our childhood at the expense of growing up are only too predictable
Mark Steyn - July 2, 2007
About a decade ago, Bill Clinton developed a favourite statistic--that every day in America 12 children died from gun violence. When one delved a little deeper into this, it turned out that 11.569 persons under the age of 20 died each day from gun violence, and five-sixths of those 11.569 alleged kindergartners turned out to be aged between 15 and 19. Many of them had the misfortune to become involved in gangs, convenience-store holdups, drive-by shootings, and drug deals, which, alas, don't always go as smoothly as one had planned. If more crack deals passed off peacefully, that "child" death rate could be reduced by three-quarters.
But, ever since President Clinton's sly insinuation of daily grade-school massacres, I've become wary of political invocations of "the children." In Iraq, for example, everyone in U.S. uniform is a "child." "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute," as Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote about Cindy Sheehan. Miss Dowd had rather less to say about the moral authority of Linda Ryan, whose son, Marine Cpl. Marc Ryan, was killed by "insurgents" in Ramadi. But that's because Mrs. Ryan honours her dead child as a thinking adult who "made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country."
The left is reluctant to accept that. Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." The infantilization of the military promoted by the media is deeply insulting but it suits the anti-war crowd's purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that "of course" they "support our troops," because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.
Which brings me to Canada's most famous warrior: Omar Ahmed Khadr, captured five years ago this month fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and today, since the repatriation of various Brits and Australia's David Hicks, the most celebrated of Her Majesty's subjects to be enjoying George W. Bush's hospitality at Guantanamo. Mr. Khadr is alleged to have killed Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer of America's Delta Force in the battle at Khost--or rather in the aftermath, when he was lying on the ground playing dead and hurled a grenade. And perhaps I should say not "Mr." Khadr but young Master Khadr, for he was 15 at the time. "The fact that his age is not going to be considered is a travesty of justice," Kristine Huskey of the International Human Rights Law Clinic in Washington told the Western Standard's Terry O'Neill. That's the pro-Khadr argument: he's a child. He didn't know what he was doing.
I wonder. Among Master Khadr's "fellow" Canadians, "boy soldiers" are an established feature of the British military tradition. The dean of Canadian columnists, Peter Worthington, was "under age" when he sailed on HMCS York in the Second World War. Private Walter Beck was as old as young Omar--15--when he joined the Nova Scotia Regiment in the Great War.
Omar Khadr is not just a terrorist legal matter. He represents one of the critical questions at the heart of the West's twilight struggle: what is a child? As readers will wearily recall, since 9/11 I've become a big demography bore. Recently, I was on a panel with Claire Berlinski, who, like me, has written a book on how Europe especially is running out of children, and we were, as is our wont, swapping horror stories. The Italian rural wedding full of aunts and uncles and grampas and grandmas--but no bambini. Seventeen Continental nations have deathbed fertility rates from which no society has ever recovered. Thirty per cent of German women are childless. Among German university graduates, that statistic rises to 40 per cent.
But hold it right there: is there a connection between those two numbers? In other words, instead of looking around for the children we never had, might it be quicker just to look in the mirror? As you'll know if you've got a kid in elementary school almost anywhere in the western world, we accept today that children's bodies enter adolescence much sooner: the guidance counsellor is practically slavering to get 'em hep to sex from the third grade. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. But at the same time we presume that our minds take longer and longer to form and that the end of adolescence must thus be deferred until pretty much the age Mozart was when he died. So, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he must be a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know he's just a patsy for the Bush-Blair-Harper oil war.
In Australia last year, I met a very engaging demographer who presented very lavish and detailed charts of the span of modern life. In the old three-score-and-ten, we were born, had a decade and a half or so of childhood, and were conscripted into adulthood more or less around the same time Peter Worthington signed on with the Royal Canadian Navy. In the new four-score-and-ten of the 21st century, we've extended life a couple of decades, but not our adult life, our productive life, our working life. Instead, we've created a whole new category of glacial-paced adolescence stretching from those middle-school sex-ed classes through a torpid high school and ever more indulgent and leisurely college courses to what previous generations would have regarded as early middle age. If anything, we've reduced the "adult" phase, entering the workforce later and departing it earlier, leaving government health systems to figure out how to support a population of state-funded retirees for two or three decades, for the last of which they'll require round-the-clock Alzheimer's care.
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