Today’s youth catch the eye of society only after disasters such as Columbine-style school and mall shootings, suicide, substance abuse, runaways, and slayings of parents. The root problem is never addressed (because it’s our fault). Instead, we talk about firearm laws, the war on drugs, and new school policies.
We’ve spoon-fed our youth and raised them with the notion that everyone can grow up and become whatever they want. They are unprepared to encounter obstacles set by age, race, gender, and class discrimination. Over time, obstacles become barriers because they do not know how to function in an adult society. This discovery deals a tremendous blow and disparages the individual. They feel helpless and don’t try to overcome the obstacles society sets for them. This opens the path to deviant behavior.
Rites of passage are necessary to mark one’s transition from one stage of life to the next. This leaves a map or chain of self-development embedded in a person’s conscious and is a key factor in behavior, self-confidence, and social skills.
Without proper rites of passage, people become disoriented and left in a limbo-state. This is common with our adolescents. They are often told, "Don’t act like a child," yet they are not treated as adults.
Our cultural mainstream provides pseudo-rites of passage; they are incomplete, unhealthy, and often dangerous. When a child gets older, they are encouraged to play with progressively more-complex sets of toys, entertainment may become less-censored, and they are given chores and responsibilities. There are other changes. For example, graduating from high school and college, getting a driver’s license, a first sexual experience, voting for the first time or even getting drunk. These experiences do not meet the transformational needs of young people. They don’t make a big enough impact to penetrate and change our psyche. They are superficial.
Pre-industrial societies knew the value of proper rituals and rites of passage. Girls were secluded and taught the art of womanhood by older females. Great grandmothers, aunts, mothers, and sisters educated them about the path of life. If a girl showed promise with certain gifts, for example herbs, healing, or crafts, training in those areas was intensified. Young men underwent years of martial training, a first hunt, a first kill, initiation into certain clubs of older men, scarification, the knocking out of teeth, or apprenticeship to a spiritual master. Rituals provide the vehicle for a rite of passage.
Elaborate rituals have developed around the heroic deed. Many required skills for rituals, like hunting, are no longer vital in modern society. Risking one’s life was inevitable during rituals in most traditional societies. That kind of ritual makes an impact on the psyche. This may affirm to the participant that they are somehow predestined to live. That could also explain the recent teenage craze for extreme sports. Extreme sport enthusiasts claim that the rush they get makes them feel alive.
America’s youth culture has powerful elements of rites of passage. This includes separation from family, initiations, special hairdos, clothing, piercing, tattoos, music, religious experimentation, and conscious-altering drugs. Many immerse themselves into a particular subculture. Teenagers engage in these behaviors to fill in the missing pieces of their developmental education. This is the time when they see the ugliness of the world and begin to question things. Many parents agree by saying, "They are trying to find themselves."
Anthropologist Joseph Campbell said, "Boys everywhere have a need for rituals marking passage to manhood. If society does not provide them they will inevitably invent their own."
The use of rites of passage to enter adulthood all have one central goal — respect. Whether it’s seen in the form of a gun-wielding maniac or a person becoming a doctor to appease the expectations of parents and peers, they are demanding respect.
When you throw in neglectful parents, exhausted by long work hours to make ends meet, the parents themselves may turn to drugs and alcohol and children are left in adultless communities. Also, many low-class parents leash their children with the idea that they should never expect to accomplish more than the parent has. They are fed many discouraging lies like, "College isn’t for everyone," encouraged to drop out of school, work in low-wage unskilled labor, or join the military.
Many of these children join gangs because they work, if they didn’t young people would create something else. When they encounter obstacles, the gang path seems the best choice because it’s the quickest shortcut to power and respect. Try walking into a room with all your best clothes and jewelry and lashing influential people with a silver tongue and you’re taking chances. Walk into that room with a raised gun and suddenly, looks, and social skills no longer matter, you now have everyone’s attention.
In deviant communities, peer admiration has extremely high value. Gangs provide a mock family created to distance young people from parents, create friendships, invoke fear, ensure protection or enmity, drug supply, smuggling, and income. It’s the quickest way for a street-smart person to strong-arm themselves. When you have access to influential contacts and shady individuals, you have more power. Gangs have their own code of honor and use rituals like a gang-rape, gauntlets, or murder to initiate new members. And these rituals are extreme enough to impact the psyche. This is the core power of a gang.
There are a few ways modern society could introduce positive rituals into the lives of young people. Grade schools should assess students in several areas and rate their strengths and weaknesses. Based upon this information, a student may decide to take specialized courses and earn college credits, certificates, and build degrees while still enrolled in high school. Outdoor activities and organizations like the boy scouts and girl scouts could also help develop an individual. These programs create diversity and set the individual apart, he or she would have a more established sense of purpose and direction.
We need to extend prison sentences for gang-related offenses and cut their power off at the source by implementing healthy rites of passage.
As the financial gap widens between the ruling class and lower classes, impoverished families, racism, broken homes, and unemployment leave our society in ruin. If rites of passage aren’t introduced into modern societies, teen violence will erupt and be an ever-increasing problem.
Religious intervention only fuels the problem. After-school programs and increased police forces are band-aid solutions. I would like to see primitive summer camps sprout up across the nation. They could work with Native American tribes and modern primitives to educate young people. Campers between the ages of 12-18 would take home parental-release forms for pain, endurance, or body modification rituals planned for the end of their summer stay. Would you sign the form?
Columbine Society – The Teenage Rebel Disconnect
