First, Let’s Round Up All the Teenagers

COSTA MESA — It’s like every time people try to have fun, they ban it.

--A 17-year-old Northern Californian contemplates a ban on skateboards in shopping center parking lots.

*

Kids. To revisit the old musical question, what’s the matter with kids today? From the President on down, politicians have labored mightily to legislate maturity into this current crop of teenagers. Just last week in Sacramento, it was proposed that new 16-year-old drivers be forbidden to give other teenagers rides--this from a statehouse that has counted among its members some fairly infamous motorists, sports with nicknames like “Leadfoot Lou.”

Zero tolerance is the battle cry. Zero tolerance for alcohol, tobacco, pot and, in one prominent case, over-the counter pills for menstrual cramps. Skateboarders, mall shoppers, cigarette puffers, boombox players, body piercers, cruisers--all have felt the boot of a nation at war with teenagers. Giddy from the thrill of enforcing nightly curfews, several California cities now have adopted daytime curfews as well.

We’ve got V-chips to keep the little darlins from watching television programs meant for adults, who, after all, would never succumb to the pull of sex and violence. We’ve got various school dress codes to keep them from flouncing about in backward baseball caps, baggy jeans, Bermuda shorts, khaki pants, red shirts, blue shirts, flannel shirts, Raiders jackets, sandals, sunglasses and, of course, short skirts. We’ve got tough love and, should it fail, tougher love.

*

“I’m not a crusader for beating up on children,” said a legislator from Orange County a few years back, “but I’m also not for children beating up on adults or defacing property.” His much-discussed bill would have allowed court-enforced paddling of miscreant teenagers. Amazingly, given the political climate, it failed to pass, and said legislator was last seen fending off accusations of sexual harassment. Bad boy, assume the position.

Deprived of the paddle, adults turn to other methods. Name-calling, for example: “Adolescent super-predators” seems destined to take the hyperbolic gold. There are boot camps and, better still, adult prisons. Having conquered space and the Soviet bloc, a mighty nation engages in intramural competition to determine which state can salt away the youngest criminals with adults.

“We’ve come full circle,” Stephen Herrell, a Juvenile Court judge told a conference in San Francisco last week, “We invented the juvenile justice system 100 years ago because we believed we owed kids and society something better. Now we seem to have declared this entire experiment a failure. I think this is a drastic mistake.”

He won’t go far in politics, this judge, not like California’s current Assembly speaker. It would be with a “tear in my eye,” Cruz Bustamante, Democrat, lamented last spring, but, yes, he could envision voting to execute a 13-year-old. The day before, not coincidentally, Republican Gov. Wilson had left open the “possibility” of lowering the execution age to 14. Advantage: Bustamante.

“What I wonder,” said Mike A. Males, an Irvine sociologist, “is what will happen when a 14-year-old about to receive a lethal injection requests a last cigarette. I mean, isn’t it against the law for someone that young to smoke?”

*

Males wrote “The Scapegoat Generation, America’s War on Adolescents,” a well-documented assault, myth by myth, on the notion that teenagers have erupted mysteriously into a murderous, oversexed, suicidal, drug-crazed menace. If anything, he said in an interview, the problem is more economic than hormonal. In a land of wealth, the poor get poorer, and they also get less civil, young and old alike.

He argues that most teen behavior simply reflects that of adults. Violence? Well, a lot more parents kill their children than the other way around. The same with smoking, drinking and other counts in the teen indictment. It’s just that the teens make for better copy--and politics.

“Preaching the Adolescent Apocalypse,” he observes in the book, “has proven hard to stop. Increasingly, Clinton’s health and welfare policy has consisted of blaming teenagers for nearly all major social ills: Poverty, welfare dependence, crime, gun violence, suicide, sexual promiscuity, unwed motherhood, AIDS, school failure, broken families, child abuse, drug abuse, drunken driving, smoking, and the breakdown of ‘family values’....

Oddly enough--”beyond hypocritical,” said the 46-year-old Males--this war for the most part has been waged on the watch of Sixties “children,” the “talkin ‘bout my g-g-g-generation” generation. “Sixties counterculturists told us not to trust anyone over thirty,” he concludes. “They were right. They were talking about us.”