Posted by Psilocybin at 10:34pm Apr 14 '188. Millennials are one of the smartest, most morally-endowed generations of youth ever.
One of the most frequently heard arguments against youth rights is that today's kids, be that generation Silents, Baby Boomers, Jonesers, Xers, or Millennials, are the worst ever, plagued by unprecedented retrogression and pathology. As common as this argument is, it is demonstrably false.
From 1982 to 2012, crime rates among African-American youth plummeted: property offenses declined by 51%, assault declined by 59%, robbery declined by 60%, rape declined by 66%, and even murder declined by 82%. From 1964-1969, children and teens 10-17 (Boomers born 1948 through Jonesers born 1959) were 69% more likely to commit a major crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, motor vehicle theft, or arson) than adults 18-64. In 2005, children and teens 10-17 (Millennials born 1987 through 1995) were only 9% more likely to commit a major crime than adults 18-64. And even though Donald Trump said in 2017 that "The murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years", the murder rate in America has in fact been halved since its 1991 peak. Far from the fabled heathens who have no morals because their parents didn't spank them (lest CPS take the kids away from their parents), Millennial teens and twentysomethings, whatever their race, have too many moral compunctions to murder, rape, burglarize, or assault someone or set fire to someone's beloved belongings. Sadly, the stereotype that today's youth, especially boys and especially African-Americans, are "superpredators" persists, and has cops and security officers shooting and killing Trayvon [private], Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray.
Teen pregnancy in the U.S. is at its lowest point since they began keeping data, down to 29.4 births per girls 15 to 19 in 2014. It has been dropping for decades, way down from when Boomers were teens.
Older Americans often indulge in saying that the Millennial Generation (born 1979-2004) and the Fifth World Generation (born 2005-today) are a generation of Eloi, genetically attached to their smartphones, phones that are smarter than they are. Mark Bauerlein may have titled his book The Dumbest Generation, but Millennials are also getting smarter than previous generations. As per something called the Flynn Effect, the average IQ of people in developed (and even developing countries) has risen since IQ tests were first administered. The raw score on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children test for a 15-year-old Millennial in 2014 was higher than the raw score for a 15-year-old Xer in 1991, which was higher than the raw score for a 15-year-old Joneser in 1974; the average raw score rose each time the test was updated. Co-champions were declared at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2014, 2015, and 2016, for only the fourth, fifth, and sixth times since the bee's inception in 1925. Word lists got increasingly harder; the winning words from 1935 to 1941 were "intelligible", "eczema", "promiscuous", "sanitarium", "canonical", "therapy", and "initials", while the winning words from 2007 to 2013 were "serrefine", "guerdon", "Laodicean", "stromuhr", "cymotrichous", "guetapens", and "knaidel".
In 2018, Americans were sprayed with media frenzies over teens eating Tide Pods and snorting condoms. The moral panic over these "trends", however, has turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. Reports of being poisoned by laundry detergent pods were actually down in 2018, at the same time the media hype over this alleged teen fad was spiking. The trend stories were trend pieces reporting on previously written trend pieces, with acts of detergentophagy less common than the media would have their unwitting dupes believe. The stories on condom-snorting quoted one Stephen Enriquez, a state education specialist who said, "Because these days our teens are doing everything for likes, views and subscribers . . . As graphic as it is, we have to show parents because teens are going online looking for challenges and recreating them". But as the Washington Post wrote: "There's just one small problem, however: Those headlines were wrong. The only thing viral about the condom challenge right now is the moral panic about the idea of teens doing the condom challenge. In a matter of days, word spread from a single local news report to a small army of local and national publications across the world, all warning about a challenge that, in 2018, barely exists." An article in a university paper describes the act of condom-snorting as early as 1993, when Xers were teens. These aren't the first "teen challenge trends" that are built on no data of real trends at all. In the past, the media has seen stories on the Blue Whale suicide game, smoking bedbugs, vodka-soaked tampons, and sex bracelets. There's not even any evidence that rainbow parties are any more than an urban legend. Sorry, but real youth are not as dumb as urban folklore makes them out to be.
9. Youth rights are human rights.
Many of the things minors are or can be restricted from doing in the United States are basic human rights that are for every human, not just adults. Yet too many Americans allow even the most flagrant affronts to human freedom and dignity to go on when they are applied on the basis of age, even as they'd find them unacceptable if done to anyone who wasn't a child or teen. When Islamic theocracies have people arrested for blasphemy or for practicing Christianity or Baha'i Faith, it is seen as tyranny by Westerners; when an American minor is arrested for insubordination because she practices Blebdahism although her Sporgalist parents won't let her, many of those same Westerners who howl about those theocratic countries defend this as rightful parental authority. When Gordon Hirabayashi was arrested for breaking the Japanese-American curfew during World War II, this is seen now as a dark spot on American history, similar to Japanese-American internment; when San Diego imposes a curfew on under18s today, American ageists don't bat an eyelash. When Uganda has gay men arrested under sodomy laws, it's (rightly) seen as a human rights violation; when a parent grounds his teen-age son for making out with another boy, American ageists write this off as simply a parent's right. When North Korea tells its citizens they can't have hair that's too long, it gives American patriots one more reason to hate North Korea; when American schools ban long hair on their students, American ageists become apologists of the policy, saying it's "preparing students for the workplace", even if the work they'll end up doing is playing in a rock band.
People often say "I support teen rights; I just don't support adult rights for teens". Many of the ageists who use the term "adult rights" are referring not just to things like drinking, smoking, or gambling, but to every right that is currently age-restricted in the United States. But expressing a political view without being arrested because someone (your parents) won't let you express what you want to say is not an "adult right"; it is a human right. Saying yes to a life-saving operation that your parents don't want you to have because of their religious beliefs is not an "adult right"; it is a human right. Saying no to an operation that will permanently leave you minus your spleen is not an "adult right"; it is a human right. Being tried by a jury of your peers who will give you a fair shot at acquittal if you are indeed innocent is not an "adult right"; it is a human right. Being safe from getting dragged off into a gulag school is not an "adult right"; it is a human right.
Proponents of youth rights violations often argue that age discrimination is different from other forms of discrimination because being a minor is only temporary. Aside from the points above about how the things that are done to someone during her/his youth with last with her/him for her/his whole life and how lost time is never found again, this argument is unconvincing because, with race and ethnicity as the Platonic prototype of a reason to be discriminated against and racism the Platonic prototype of discrimination, every other demographic variable is unique in its own way. Yes, age and ageism are unique because a person's age changes over time. But gender and sexism are also unique because the gender an individual is assigned at birth will be the same across all countries and cultures (whereas the same person might be seen as Mulatto or Mestizo or Black in Cuba, but as Hispanic in America; different countries have different legal ages for things; and what is seen as ADD in the context on one culture is "normal" in the context of another). Religion and religious discrimination are unique because people choose their own religion (but don't choose their gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or, unless they deliberately stab their eyes out, disability.) Sexual orientation and homophobia are unique because homosexuality and bisexuality revolve around certain behaviors that many people believe are morally wrong, being about what someone does rather than just about what someone is. Disability and ableism are unique because a person's disability often renders her/him by definition unable to do something such as driving (and the term "bona fide discrimination" is in use for discriminating against disabled people in cases like these). Human rights supporters today don't say that being free from anti-Islamic discrimination isn't a human right because people choose their religion, or that being free from sexism isn't a human right because gender is a biological reality instead of just a social construct.
10. People need to be free to make their own choices; whether their choice was a "good" one is irrelevant.
Opponents of one form of youth rights will often make etiam in libris appeals to other ageist laws ("A 16-year-old is deemed too immature to vote/sign a contract/drink/buy a lotto ticket, so how can s/he be mature enough to decide what should be done with his/her body?"), without even considering the possibility that it is the conceit that a 16-year-old is too immature for the other things, rather than the conceit that a 16-year-old is mature enough to have bodily autonomy, that is in error. Indeed, today's teens are less pathological and smarter than previous generations, and are handling freedom well in the parts of the world in which they already have it. And in a 2010 academic study titled "American Sixteen- and Seventeen-Year-Olds Are Ready to Vote", Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins found that 16- and 17-year-olds are "generally indistinguishable in their capacities to function as citizens and to vote responsibly from the youngest adults (18-year-olds) who are entitled to vote". Studies about teens brains being flawed have been revealed to themselves to flawed. But just suppose your average 15-year-old or 17-year-old wasn't so bright, morally endowed, and capable of using judgment. Then would it be acceptable to deny them the right to smoke weed, stay out late, live away from their parents, or choose what is done to her/his own body?
Many people say violating a minor's wishes and freedoms is acceptable because it's "for their own good". But if something is a personal choice that doesn't harm a second party without her/his consent, it's not morally wrong, and therefore should not be illegal. Suppose a scientific study showed that 90% of women who wear red lipstick pass an arbitrary neuroscientific test of intellectual maturity, 70% of women who wear tan lipstick pass it, and only 40% of women who wear pink lipstick pass it. Should women who wear pink lipstick be denied the right to drink, smoke, gamble, choose what clothes (besides lipstick) to wear, sign a contract, leave a will, or (if married) move away from or divorce their husbands? Some people would say no, since just because a majority of pink-lipsticked women are that way, that doesn't mean those who are capable of good decisions should be discriminated against on a sweeping basis. Some others would say yes, since the government needs to make decisions that are in these women's best interest, decisions they are too incompetent to make, and if the law made an exception for the compos-mentis pink-lipstickers, it would have to make an exception for everyone (i.e. the non-compos-mentis pink-lipstickers). I say no, since these are personal decisions that these women wanted to make, even if the results aren't judged to be in their material best interest; it's not an unethical decision, assuming that those who drink or toke don't drive under the influence, that those who gamble don't break into their husbands' bank accounts to finance their habit, etc.
If a teen wants to get her navel pierced, even knowing the risk of infection, it's a decision she should be allowed to make, not because it's a well-thought out decision, but because it's her decision. (Concerns about her parents having to pay for treatment if the navel gets infected will be obviated once youth rights is instituted and the age of emancipation is reduced.) And if the navel does get infected, then who's to say that the infection was not worth the payoff of being happy about the hip way a piercing looks? What's appalling is that many youth rights opponents will say the teen shouldn't have gotten pierced after they watched the navel get infected, even when the teen declared upon the infection that the trip to the piercing clinic was "worth it".
Also, what is in a person's best interest physically is not always the same as what is in a person's best interest emotionally. If I were blinded in one eye in an accident as a kid and had the eye surgically removed against my wishes, physically I would avoid going blind in the other eye, but emotionally I would be unable to accept myself, engage in self-loathing for having a glass eye, and live the rest of my life in resentment. If the doctor respected my wishes, however, physically I would eventually go blind in the good eye from sympathetic ophthalmia, but emotionally I would calmly accept myself, knowing I still had both my eyeballs in their sockets. Who's to say that the physical good is more important than the emotional good and therefore a child or teen shouldn't be able to make a medical decision for her/himself?
And punishing people hurts them -- emotionally, in terms of future employment prospects, and in the way they are viewed by society, which attaches a stigma to getting in trouble. Autonomy is a beautiful thing in and of itself, even when the details of how it works out aren't always what older people tell youth the latter should want. As Sir Isaiah Berlin put it, "those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human".
Cont'd - Psilocybin