Underachievers at a Dead End
by
Tom Baxter
Georgia Online News Service
We've seen that face before, though it was easy to forget. Young, pasty-faced, non-threatening, it might be the face of the underemployed young man still living with his parents down the street, or the student with no honors by his name in the class yearbook. Pretty girls pay little attention to faces like this.
It's only when this generic underachiever blows away several people or someone famous, that we trouble ourselves to study that face, the face of Michael Kenneth McLendon, who killed 10 people in south Alabama Wednesday, or Tim Kretschmer, who killed 15 in Germany the same day. Young men like these seem to have tragic bad timing: Bereft of attention all their lives, they often do their killing on the same news cycle.
This is the face of Arthur Bremer, of John Hinckley, of Eric and Dylan, the Columbine boys, and dozens upon dozens of faces whose rampages have faded into memory.
We can't presume to understand what hidden abuses might have caused any of these individuals to snap, or whether there was any particular reason at all. When a man systematically kills his mother, grandmother, uncle and cousin, it hints of some dark family secret. But McClendon killed people he didn't know as well, and later stories from Alabama have shot down the earlier report that he kept a hit list.
There is, however, overwhelming evidence that underneath each specific case of hidden turmoil, there runs a deep current of humiliation and shame.
"Everyone laughs at me, nobody recognizes my potential," Kretschmer, the German high school kid, wrote before his rampage.
Many people have similar feelings, but it's the effect these emotions have specifically on young men with marginal sexual or financial prospects that has this murderous result, whether the gun laws are those of the state of Alabama or the Federal Republic of Germany.
"The biggest problem of the world today is unemployed young men," a cab driver in Cape Town, South Africa, said to me in 1994. I can't think of a single thing any politician or policy wonk has said to me that has echoed louder and more consistently in this age of terrorism and uncertainty than those words. Worldwide, it takes many forms, but across many ethnic lines, the nondescript faces of this problem look strikingly similar.
By coincidence, on the same day this week's shootings occurred, President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure they are "treated fairly all matters of public policy." There are still many reasons why special care should be taken to ensure that women aren't discriminated against in the workplace, that domestic violence is treated as a serious problem and that girls get the same educational opportunities as boys.
But this is not our only gender-specific problem. Sometime this year, for the first time in history, the number of American women drawing a paycheck will exceed that of men. This doesn't mean that women suddenly are doing a lot better. It means that men are being disproportionally affected by the economic downturn and are doing a lot worse.
Whether the current economy bothered McClendon at all is uncertain; he seems to have quit a couple of jobs by choice. Like most of his brethren, however, there's a familiar dead-end quality to the outlines of his story.
Even more so in hard times than the boom years, we urgently need to understand the psyches behind these easy-to-forget faces. We need to figure out how young men like these can gain a sense of self-worth, the lack of which becomes so abundantly obvious only after it has taken its toll. Maybe we need a White House Council on Men and Boys.
Tom Baxter is editor of the Southern Political Report and senior vice president of its parent company, InsiderAdvantage, a media and polling firm. He was the chief political correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 20 years. [full bio]
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Editor's note: Today we offer you three in-depth pieces that dismantle some of the most complex issues facing our state and the South – the power of government to determine which schools students must attend, the role of unions in big business, and rampages by youths with guns. These stories are timely news analyses, written by veteran reporters and educators. We think your readers will find them thought-provoking and enlightening.
Georgia Online News Service reporter Maggie Lee is at the Capitol right now, monitoring the House's Crossover Day discussions. Should there be news of note, we will whisk out an extra edition with details later today.
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