“Teen takeover” events have been in the news lately.
The latest one in Jacksonville came when kids were out of school for spring break and 200 teens gathered at Blue Cypress Park. After fights broke out, police shut down the event and arrested three girls.
This came on the heels of a gathering at Jacksonville Beach in February that involved shootings that left five people wounded.
It isn’t just Florida. There have been “teen takeover” headlines all over the country. And the reactions often have been: What’s wrong with kids today? And where are the parents?
“Permissive parenting leads to such behavior,” said a recent op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Teen gatherings are hardly new
I’m not going to say that we shouldn’t be worried about teen takeovers. We should be. And I’m not going to say that if hundreds of kids suddenly gathered in some area near me, I wouldn’t be concerned. I would be.
But I’m not sure I buy that teenagers today are so much different than when I was one. And I know my parents weren’t always aware of what I was doing.
I guess I can go ahead and write this now that Mom and Dad are gone: You know those times I said I was going over to my friend Kirk’s house? I didn’t always go over to Kirk’s house. Sometimes I ended up going to the place where a bunch of teens were gathering, the preacher’s kid driving the family car onto a frozen lake — this obviously wasn’t Florida — or to a field on the edge of town.
On a beautiful spring day years before “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” came out, a group of us skipped school, drove 100 miles to a Major League Baseball game and made it home in time to answer questions about how school was that day. Or at least mumble the usual one-word teen answers.
Speaking of movies, I recently watched parts of one about a teen takeover.
It wasn’t described that way. But it was the story of teenagers on a single summer night, taking over the main street of their town, cruising up and down it in cars. One of the kids gets coerced into joining a gang, stealing money from a business and hooking a cable to a police car, ripping out its rear axle. There are teens looking for liquor and sex. One drinks enough that he gets sick. Before sunrise, word spreads that there’s going to be a drag race on Paradise Road.
“American Graffiti,” released in 1973 and set in 1962, often is described as a nostalgic, coming-of-age movie.
Teen gatherings aren’t just a staple of cinema, from “Dazed and Confused” (which hit home for someone who grew up in the 1970s) to “Superbad.” I did a Google search asking: “What’s the country song where the singer reminisces about being young, heading to some gathering, drinking beer, listening to music, trying to hook up, raising some hell?”
Google broke into laughter and said, “Why don’t you ask which country song isn’t about that?”
I’m kidding. Google didn’t do that. But it did spit out a long list of possible examples, songs like Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem,” written by Colt Ford and Brantley Gilbert.
In that song, Aldean sings about driving down a dirt road, “ice cold beer sittin’ in the console,” reminiscing about good times: “back in the day Potts farm was the place to go,” learning to kiss and cuss — and fight, too. Being well aware that maybe they were doing some things they shouldn’t be doing (“better watch out for the boys in blue”).
What was wrong with those kids? And where were their parents?
Social media and guns
So I don’t buy that teens today are completely different than in the past. But today’s mass teen gatherings are troubling, particularly when some involved make them turn violent or destructive.
One big difference between then and now: social media.
It not only makes it much easier than it was in our day to spread the word fast and wide about a gathering, it leads to the sharing of video of the gathering. Both ends of this equation feed into some of the scenes we’ve seen in recent years.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m glad social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager.
But perhaps the biggest difference: guns.
Some of the teen gatherings have ended with a tale as old as time, the police showing up and kids fleeing. But too many have involved gunshots.
When I was a teenager and we gathered, I don’t remember anyone ever having a gun. There was plenty of testosterone and stupidity, leading to occasional fights that inevitably created little more than a buzz in school on Monday morning.
Guns aren’t the problem with teen takeovers. But they are a part of it. And this isn’t just a teen takeover problem. It’s a very American one.
A recent road rage incident on Jacksonville’s Westside ended with both drivers stopping their vehicles to confront each other, and one pulling out a gun and shooting the other in the chest, killing him. And this type of story wasn’t a first in recent memory.
All of this isn’t to suggest that teen takeovers should be shrugged off.
We need to give kids more places to go, more things to do. We need adults — parents and the community — to stay engaged, even when teens would prefer they didn’t. And we need to acknowledge what has changed and what hasn’t.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Teen takeovers aren’t new. The difference is social media. And guns.
Reporting by Mark Woods, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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