Make Teenagers Reckless Again

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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If you ever feel compelled to steal a dead-end sign, do not attempt to uproot it post and all. Instead, focus just on the sign itself. Even if you don’t have the tools necessary, there are tricks to popping it from its perch. I will not be sharing those here — this is not “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” — but suffice it to say that tools are not always necessary when brute force, a modicum of ingenuity, and unyielding idiocy are readily available.

Part two of this advice is that if you do attempt to steal a dead-end sign, post and all, and abandon said plan upon realizing it’s not going to work, do not hop into the getaway car and floor it down the same dead-end road from which you were attempting to steal said sign. Remember, there is a reason it was placed there. You may not find, as my idiot friends and I did, a large unfenced and un-landscaped yard at the end offering the opportunity to do a sliding 360 through before exiting back out onto the road and driving away. 

I can admit this because we’re well beyond the statute of limitations for this attempted crime; also I am generally long past the urge to engage in petty theft of public property. As a teenager, though, as teenagers are wont to be, I was stupid. I was reckless. I sometimes had conversations with the police, conversations that on two occasions resulted in court appearances. We used to call these rites of passage. Today, though, teens have decided to be responsible rather than reckless, which sounds well and good, but greatness is not built upon the shoulders of responsibility. 

Looking at this graph, I can see my escapades occurred around the time an appetite for destruction peaked. I graduated high school in 1994, which looks to be when roughly 57% of young men craved danger, when doing so often literally involved saying, “Hold my beer.” Now, though, only 35% of young men feel similarly, which is no way to create an enduring future. 

A large part of the problem lies with my generation. We Gen Xers love to boast, but we helped invent participation trophies and helicopter parenting. We bragged about our limitless freedoms while taking our own kids to scheduled and adult-monitored activities most nights of the week. We compared stories about various whuppings while engaging in gentle parenting. We did this. 

Granted, in the words of Seymour Skinner, we’re not wrong. It’s the kids who are out of touch. They’re supposed to rebel, not conform. And rebellion would be super easy right now. Not rebellion like we see via influencers and their bizarre reenactments of Bret Easton Ellis’s fever dreams — see, for instance, Clavicular — but in terms of abject stupidity. 

There are structural obstacles to overcome thanks to the digital surveillance state and smartphones, but GPS spoofing technology is readily available. It’s quite easy to set your location to a known safe space while instead “borrowing” a friend’s dad’s car and taking a road trip for the weekend. There are still dirt roads just waiting to have a campfire built at the end of them. There are still older brothers to buy beer and parents who don’t visit the room when the kids have company over.

But it also takes us, as parents, to gently nudge our progeny to do something senseless every day, especially if it scares them. We have to loosen the reins and let them live, to tell them, “The older you do get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep living, man. L-I-V-I-N.”

And sometimes we’re going to have to help them. At a graduation party recently, the fathers and celebratory son gathered in the kitchen. An exceptionally nice bottle of bourbon was produced. The young man, close to heading out into the world, joined the old men in a soupçon of the nectar, then proceeded to go outside and light up a cigar. At one point, when it started to go out, someone had to hold his beer while he hit the end with the flame. 

He did not look natural with his Glencairn, nor his cigar, but he did look like someone who might need bail money at some point. And at some point after that, he’ll be a captain of industry. For as Chief Wiggum said, when some killjoys attempted to bring back prohibition, “Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine.”

The United States, despite much handwringing to the contrary, is still a great nation, one full of hope and promise. But if we’re going to keep building upon the greatness that previous generations have bequeathed us, we’re going to have to remember that truth. We’re also going to have to remember that the future founders, mars colonizers, and world-class athletes are likely young degenerates today. They’re the ones too stupid to realize they can’t accomplish whatever risky venture they put their minds to. Now if someone could hold my beer, I see a dead-end sign off in the distance that would look fantastic in my oldest daughter’s dorm room.