of your teachers’ efforts will be devoted to your more promising peers, and so will your nation’s resources. But your parents will explain to you that this is the way it is, and early on, you will know to expect very little from school.
There are still a few enclaves, reservations. The shop and crafting culture of your parents’ class of origin is one pocket of refuge. In the vocational high school, your interests are rewarded, once you have allowed yourself to be dumped there. And if the skills you gather there don’t really lead to anything much, there’s always the military.
Even though half the kids in America today will never go to college, the country still acts as if they will. At least, most schools seem to be set up to prepare you for college. And if it’s not what you can or want to do, their attitude is tough shit, it’s your problem.
And your most devoted teachers at vocational high school will never tell you that the training you will get from them is barely enough to get your foot in the door. You picture yourself getting into something with a future only to find that your skills are obsolete, superficial, and the boss prefers people with more training, more experience, more promise. So you are stuck in dead-end “youth employment jobs,” and now what?
According to the William T. Grant Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship, 20 million people between the ages of 16 and 24 are not likely to go to college. The “forgotten half,” as youth advocates call them, will find jobs in service and retail. But the money is bad, only half that of typical manufacturing jobs. The good, stable jobs that don’t require advanced training have been disappearing rapidly. From 1979 to 1985 the U.S.A. suffered a net loss of 1.7 million manufacturing jobs. What’s left?
In my neighborhood, the shipping and warehousing jobs that guys like the Grinders took, hedging their bets against rock stardom, are now seen as “good jobs” by the younger guys at Metal 24. I am regularly asked to … “find out if they’re hiring” down at [the] shipping company. Dead-end kids around here who aren’t working with family are working “shit jobs.”
The skills used in a typical “shit job” … involve slapping rancid butter on stale hard rolls, mopping the floor, selling Lotto tickets, making sure shelves and refrigerators are clean, sorting and stacking magazines, taking delivery on newspapers, and signing out videos. They are also advised to look out for shoplifters, to protect the register, and to be sure that the surveillance camera is running. Like most kids in shit jobs, they are most skilled at getting over on the boss and in developing strategies to ward off boredom. It is not unusual to see kids at the supermarket cash register or the mall clothing shop standing around with a glazed look in their eyes. And you will often hear them complain of boredom, tiredness, or whine: I can’t wait to get out of here. Usually, in shit jobs this is where it begins and ends. There aren’t many alternatives.
Everywhere, such kids find getting into a union or having access to supervisory or managerial tracks hard to come by. Some forms of disinvestment are more obvious than others. In a company town, you will be somewhat clear about what is going on. At the end of the 1980s, the defense industry of Long Island seemed threatened; people feared that their lives would soon be devastated.
But the effect of a changing economic order on most kids only translates into scrambling for a new safety zone. It is mostly expressed as resentment against entrepreneurial foreigners (nonwhites) and as anomie—a vague sense of loss, then confusion about where they might fit in….
So where are we going? Some people fear we are polarizing into a two-class nation, rich and poor. More precisely, a privileged knowledge-producing class and a low-paid, low-status service class. It is in the public high school that this division of labor for an emergent postindustrial local economy is first articulated. At the top are the kids who will hold jobs in a highly competitive technological economic order, who will advance and be respected if they cooperate and excel.
At the bottom are kids with poor basic skills, short attention spans, limited emotional investment in the future. Also poor housing, poor nutrition, bad schooling, bad lives. And in their bad jobs they will face careers of unsatisfying part-time work, low pay, no benefits, and no opportunity for advancement.
There are the few possibilities offered by a relative—a coveted place in a union, a chance to join a small family business in a service trade, a spot in a small shop. In my neighborhood, kids dream of making a good score on the cop tests, working up from hostess to waitress. Most hang out in limbo hoping to get called for a job in the sheriff’s department, or the parks, or sanitation. They’re on all the lists, although they know the odds for getting called are slim. The lists are frozen, the screening process is endless.
Meantime they hold jobs for a few months here and there, or they work off the books, or at two bad jobs at once….
When he gave the eulogy at his godson’s funeral, Tommy Olton’s uncle Richard was quoted as saying: When I held you in my arms at your baptism, I wanted it to be a fresh start, for you to be more complete than we had ever been ourselves, but I wonder if we expected too much. In thinking only of ourselves, maybe we passed down too great a burden.
Trans-historically, cross-culturally, humans have placed enormous burdens on their young. Sometimes these burdens have been primarily economic: The child contributes to the economy of the family or tribe. Sometimes the burden has been social—the child is a contribution to the immortality of our creed. Be fruitful and multiply.
But the spiritual burden we pass on to the child may be the most difficult to bear. We do expect them to fulfill an incompleteness in ourselves, in our world. Our children are our vehicle for the realization of unfulfilled human dreams: our class aspirations, our visions of social justice and world peace, of a better life on earth.
Faith in the child, in the next generation, helps get us through this life. Without this hope in the future through the child we could not endure slavery, torture, war, genocide, or even the ordinary, everyday grind of a “bad life.” The child-as-myth is an empty slate upon which we carve our highest ideals. For human beings, the child is God, utopia, and the future incarnate. The Bergenfield suicide pact ruptured the sacred trust between the generations. It was a negation.
After I had been to Bergenfield, people asked me: Why did they do it? People want to know in 25 words or less. But it’s more complicated than that. I usually just say: They had bad lives, and try to explain why these lives ended where, when, and how they did. But I still wonder, at what point are people pushed over the line?
On the surface the ending of the four kids’ bad lives can be explained away by the “case history” approach. Three of the four had suicidal or self-destructive adult role models: the suicide of Tommy Olton’s father, the drug-related death of the Burress sisters’ father. Tommy Rizzo, along with his three friends, had experienced the recent loss of a beloved friend, Joe Major. Before Joe, the death of three other local “burnouts.” Then there was the chronic drug and alcohol abuse, an acknowledged contributing factor in suicide. Families ruptured by divorce, death, estrangement. Failure at school.
But these explanations alone would not add up to a suicide pact among four kids. If they did, the teenage suicide rate would be much, much higher. The personal problems experienced by the four kids were severe, painful, but by the 1980s, they were no longer remarkable.
For a while I wondered if the excessive labeling process in Bergenfield was killing off the “burnouts.” Essentially, their role, their collective identity in their town was that of the [outcaste]. Us and Them, the One and the Other. And once they were constituted as “burnouts” by the town’s hegemonic order, the kids played out their assigned role as self-styled outcasts with irony, style, and verve.
Yes, Bergenfield was guilty of
