WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE REALLY NEED: NOT VOLUNTEERISM BUT HAPPINESS AND HEROES

by Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D.
Essayist, Ayn Rand Institute

In recent months, America has been the scene of a spate of schoolyard shootings, resulting in several tragic deaths.  Why?

It is commonplace to hear voices in the media proclaim that no one can answer the question why a youngster decides to kill.  And if any explanation is offered at all, it invariably lays the blame on guns, evading the fact that hundreds of lives are saved each year by guns used in self-defense.

As I explained in Fatal Blindness, the ideas of statism are responsible for the creation of criminals, including those schoolyard murderers now multiplying across this land (see The Cradle of Crime).   But consider the role played by the decades of our mainstream culture making a joke out of heroes.

As a young boy, in the late 40's and early 50's, I spent virtually every Saturday afternoon at the local movie theater.  The theater was always packed with kids more or less my age.  We watched cowboy movies that pitted the good guys against the bad guys.  Guns were blazing and when the good guys arrived to save the innocent from the evil doers, the theater erupted with an explosion of electrifying cheers for the heroes who were about to make good triumph over evil.  None of us came away from this experience with a fascination for guns, but only with an inspiration to be like the heroes depicted in the movies.  There was no glory in being a bad guy.  The glory was in being good, in doing something great and important with one's life.

Today's youngsters have mostly grown up with a cultural diet of "cool" villains with redeeming virtues and "heroes" with "humanizing" flaws who have a sense of humor about themselves and make light of their achievements.  Is a bad person presented as unmitgated, inexcusable evil?   Nope.  There is always an excuse and the bad person is simply another victim of something (and today it is almost invariably "child abuse").  If a youngster grows up laughing at heroes and feeling sympathy for villains who are "victims," is there any wonder some of these children turn into killers?

We all need heroes for inspiration.  Children need them most of all.

Fulton Huxtable
May 24, 1998

Copyright © 1998.  All rights reserved.