A Former ‘Manchild’ Asks: When Did Kids Turn Killers?

One of America’s most egregious societal tragedies is that murder does not sell newspapers the way it did 20 or 30 years ago. In the 1950s, if a teen-ager killed an old woman it would make the front page of every paper in town. Today it gets a few paragraphs inside the papers, if at all. Has the act of murder become so commonplace in the major urban centers of this nation that it is no longer newsworthy, perhaps even boring? The answer is an emphatic no!

The violent miasma that has slowly and banefully crept across America during the preceding 20-year epoch has left most rational Americans in a state of low-grade catatonic depression. Their eyes, their brains, their senses all appear to be functioning normally, but the inner recesses of their minds have long been in a state of fail-safe shutdown to avoid being irreparably traumatized by humankind’s collective determination to annihilate what passes for civilization without use of a nuclear bomb. Blaring headlines announcing man’s most recent and most depraved inhumanity to man tend to aggravate this very delicate neurological condition. Reading about brutal murders, daily, should be depressing.

In the New York City of the 1950s, murders committed during the course of a robbery or climaxing an argument or during a gang fight were not rare occurrences, but in the last year of that decade things turned scary. A Puerto Rican teen-ager knifed two white teen-agers to death on a playground in midtown Manhattan, and for a week the crime held the front pages of most of the city’s eight major daily newspapers. “West Side Story” was playing on Broadway then, but suddenly tensions between white kids and Puerto Ricans didn’t look so romantic. And death by knifing--that was maniacal.

In the New York City teen-age gang fights of the 1940s and ‘50s we used homemade guns, zip guns and knives. On the exceptional occasions when a zip gun actually fired and accidentally wounded someone who happened to be in the unintended line of fire, the shooter was usually equally as surprised as the victim. More often than not the shooter became the victim of the zip gun or “homemade,” a crudely constructed simulation of a Smith & Wesson that would explode in his hand.

The knife-wielders in the gangs were experts at cutting and stabbing the enemy only superficially. There were invariably one or two psychopaths in every gang who really didn’t mind killing people, but everybody knew how to handle them.

Now America’s inner cities have become the spawning grounds for adolescents who bear increasingly appalling resemblances to rabid, homicidal maniacs. They are acting out slaughterous action scenes from the most barbarous gangster movies on the streets of major American cities in real life, in living color. No, make that dying color--blood red.

The nation’s social scientists futilely ponder the questions: When did the break with reality transpire? What produced it? When and why did little girls stop playing with doll babies and start having real babies? When and why did little boys on America’s Main Streets relinquish the game of pointing their fingers at each other and yelling “bang bang you’re dead” and resort to enacting these deadly B-movie scenarios with real bullets from real guns?

It appears that a homicidal mania erupted in New York City and Chicago in the early 1970s and proliferated throughout all of urban America for the next 15 years. Now wars resulting from the crack epidemic have caused an increase in the number, frequency and randomness of killings by the gang members, and America is outraged.

More than a generation ago New York City’s anti-social teen-age population arrived at the consensus that gang-banging was gauche; too juvenile, too unhip. Thus, for the sake of sophisticating their violence, endowing it with a previously absent plausibility, they inaugurated an urban reign of terror commonly noted as a national mugging epidemic.

In the early 1970s it became fashionable among young criminals to kill mugging victims. Life and sudden death on our nation’s mean streets had an equal-opportunity mandate. Women, senior citizens and disabled persons were no longer the chief prey. Although then, as now, the majority of casualties were other adolescents, a brutal, audacious army of urban youths mugged people of all ages, sexes, colors and socio-economic strata. And the mugging was mostly an excuse, a warped rationale, for killing them.

A partial chronology of these bloody absurdities clearly illustrates the maniacal ethos of this accelerating homicidal culture: In 1979 they killed one another for mopeds, in 1980 for bicycles, in 1981 for gold chains, in 1982 for leather coats, in 1983 for boom boxes and upscale jogging shoes, in 1984 for designer eyeglass frames and bomber jackets, and from 1985 to the present for crack money and all of the previously mentioned items of meager monetary value.

Since 1950 every succeeding decade has ushered in what I choose to label a monster drug, an illegal narcotic that has an unprecedented amount of violence attendant with its rapidly increasing usage.

Heroin was the monster drug of the 1950s and 1960s. The monster drug of the 1970s was angel dust or PCP. And the current monster drug, which can more accurately be termed a super monster drug, is definitely crack cocaine. None of the earlier monster drugs has had as devastating an effect on the non-drug-using segment of society as crack has. Even heroin, the uses of which have been at an epidemic level in inner-city communities for more than 25 years, has had its destructive and corruptive force at least equaled by crack in only five years.

The old-timer block boys (neighborhood street-corner loiterers beyond the age of 40) contend that the signal of the arrival of a new monster drug in the neighborhood is when “the kids in the projects start throwing their mommas out the 15th-story windows again.” Such bestial behavior from former human beings is certainly an indication of a monstrous influence abounding in ungentrified American urbania. What sets crack apart as a super monster drug is that kids in the projects who are now motherless are throwing their friends’ mothers out the windows.

Crack is irrefutably the most devastating of all the monster drugs to afflict any American adolescent generation thus far in this nation’s history. But, just as heroin and angel-dust abuse were merely symptoms of a fundamentally socio-economic problem, crack is nothing more than a prodigious, horrifying symptom of the most recent manifestation of a deeply rooted social disease. Just as drastically limiting the accessibility of mopeds, designer sunglasses and bomber jackets did not end the killing, eliminating crack is not the answer.

The humane solution to the problem of excluding young minorities from a stake in the American dream is simply to include them, which, of course, might not be so simple. The nation’s young crack dealers are merely pursuing the American dream along what they see is the only channel open to them--drug-dealing entrepreneurial ventures. True, it’s a high-risk endeavor, but so is life in America for minority youth. As they see it, what alternatives do they have?

Perhaps the black and Latino adolescents in the United States have subconsciously adopted the death wish expressed for them in the historical national attitude of America, which programs them to self-destruct between the ages of 15 and 25 years. Considering how they are not now, nor have they ever been, included in the American dream plan, they appear to be zealously accommodating the system. Before three years ago, the Crips and the Bloods in Los Angeles had nothing more substantial than their colors (which represented a traditional animus) to kill each other over. Now they have dubiously promising careers in the crack industry. Welcome to the inner city’s 1980s version of the American dream. If they would only do it more discreetly, more quietly, then we could all go back to watching the Bill Cosby and Jesse Jackson shows and reminding ourselves how truly wonderful life is in this glorious land of deadly opportunity.

But of course we can still attempt to apply the solution: Assimilate them into the American dream. It’s not too late for the next generation.