“No Country For Young Men”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Due to my upcoming spinal fusion surgery, I’m running some previously published columns till I’m once again comfortable sitting in a computer chair (or anywhere else, for that matter). This piece was written almost two years ago but, considering the current wave of riots in Greece, the ongoing predations of the Somali pirates, and the continuing border crossings, into Afghanistan, of Pakistan’s “bad boys,” another or whom (if just a bit older) just tried to obliterate Times Square, well, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.)

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—5/17/10—Late in 2008, after the massacre in Mumbai, during the first of the street riots in Greece (my other homeland), and considering the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the pirates off the Somali coast, the suicide bombers of Iraq, I realized that, if all single young men on this planet, between, say, the ages of 12 and 30, were somehow “Raptured” off elsewhere, culled from our herd, banished to another dimension, “beamed up, Scottie” . . . many, many, many of the planet’s current problems would evaporate with them.

It occurred to me that “my inner Herod,” and we all have an inner Herod, really felt like Final-Solutioning all pubescent boys “off the island,” as they phrase it on “Survivor.”

We, collectively, have too many aimless, uneducated, hopeless, desperate, un-fathered, disenfranchised, never-to-be-fully-employed young men, swirling like lethal storms out of one failed country into another slightly more stable country (Pakistanis and Albanians to Greece; Pakistanis to Afghanistan and India; Zimbabweans to South Africa; everyone in South America who can make it, north to the US; anyone permitted in, to Europe), and then trashing it . . . overwhelming its services, encroaching on the turf of its own under-class, sinking into crime and narcotics.

OK: I simplify, but my broad strokes should resonate with you.

It’s an old, old problem—Lost Boys, as “The (PBS) News Hour” essayist put it last night—lost, lethal boys. But now, so many of them have access to Kalishnakovs and IED’s and Molotov cocktails and, un-fathered, are being fathered into lives of violence by “camp trainers” and “crew operators” and drug lords and Mullahs who use this boy-power for their own nefarious ends. Now, too, so many of them have absolutely nothing to lose, and many follow a religion that promises Nirvana, on the other side of the mayhem they produce among us.

Unchanneled young male rage; the savage pubescent male breast, unsoothed by the ministrations of nubile young women (music’s not enough, believe me); fatherless, undisciplined boys, sent off to find their fortune abroad because their families-of-origin have no food, no roof for them, no way of containing them: well, we’ve got a problem, Houston, and it’s spreading everywhere, like a testosterone-charged-neoplasm.

The real reason for The Crusades had nothing to do with religious fervor, or “saving the Holy Land from the Infidel”: it had everything to do with getting pesky younger sons out of the castle, and off to serve as cannon fodder . . . elsewhere; abroad.

Anyone who’s dealt with surly male teenagers knows one thing: it takes a man to deal with boys, finally—a father, an uncle, or a grandfather. It takes a man to create a man.

The Aborigines of Australia had a wise policy: fathers and elders would train their sons in all the myriad skills needed for survival in an unforgiving land, and then send them off on a Walkabout—both a rite of passage, and a true test of manhood. If the young men came back, survived, they’d passed the test. If not, they’d not had what it took to survive in the Outback, to be men where they had to be men.

No Kalishnakovs on the Walkabout. No going off to someone else’s country to trash it and create problems for the burghers. No Jihad amongst the Aborigines. Just the logic of living by a set of rules forged for where you were born; sons fathered and, so, able to father. Once upon a time.

Me, I’m so angry at men right now I could spit. One of my mantras is that it takes 50 years to “mature” an American man. Our culture’s just not very good at getting boys to grow up, take responsibility, perceive their communities’ needs and meet them. Our culture’s fathers (with exceptions, of course) seem no longer up to turning their sons over their knees, or teaching them what they need to know for their own version of the Walkabout, American-style.

And, as far as I can see, Southeast Asian and Pakistani and Albanian and many South American fathers must be so busy struggling to earn a living, keep some food in the larder, that all their sons are learning is that they’ll have to leave home, be smuggled into Europe or America or farther afield . . . or even out to a fat, vulnerable cruise ship or tanker off the Somali coast . . . to survive. No holds barred; no birth-fathers watching.

Boys. Bad boys alone and abroad, stacked in bunks in cheap hotels (as in Athens, Greece), peddling fake designer junk and drugs on the street. Till the police make a sweep. Then, when the coast is clear, there they are again.

Someone asked me, today, what I thought might solve (just) Greece’s current problems which, if you know anything about Modern Greek History, are made very complicated indeed by repeated betrayals by the West, again and again, over time, ever since the Greek Civil War (which followed the Second World War, in Europe).

I said I thought a curfew must be established in the cities, and those breaking it jailed. That the greybeards in all Greece’s political parties needed to step forward, united, and say that they would no longer condone the disruption of the public peace by . . . anyone. That demonstrations, even the most peaceful, would be delayed until the lunatics, the hired thugs and the anarchists could be separated from the peaceful marchers holding placards—not possible, for the nonce. And that the fathers, all the fathers, of Athens and Patras and Thessaloniki should be put on notice: your kid gets jailed; YOU get jailed, too . . . for failing to control your progeny. Oh. And no more illegal immigration from powderkeg countries to the East and South. No more illegal immigration, period. And no hiring of illegal immigrants to do all the dirty work in the tourist industry and elsewhere. Greek boys: step up to wash those dishes and tote those suitcases; make those beds and do that laundry. Or Dad will take his belt to you.

Basically, boys become what their fathers make them, and the Mumbai terrorists, the Athenian anarchists, the gangs of Albanians wreaking havoc in Greece, in winter, the hordes of Spanish-speakers pouring into America, undocumented and uncontrollable . . . well, where are their fathers, and have they no shame? If you can’t feed even yourself, don’t have children: you can figure that one out. If you can’t control the children you do have, don’t export them elsewhere, to live lives of crime and mayhem.

I’d be looking for the father and grandfather of that little Pakistani punk with the big gun in Mumbai; and the father and grandfather of the idiot policeman who gunned down the 15-year-old in Athens; and the father and grandfather of the Blackhawk contractors who mowed down innocent Iraqis in Baghdad.

In one respect, I guess I DO agree with the NRA: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Mostly, it’s “boys” who kill people these days, it seems, and I want their fathers put on notice.