Clockwork Orange Reimagined

Teens seem somehow to have been afflicted with an attitude that they can do whatever they feel inspired to, that rules, regulations, laws are to be flouted and that's all right because they're expressing themselves. And because they've been taught over their formative years that the world revolves about them and their interests they're convinced that anything they conspire to do among them will be overlooked.

And so far, for the most part, they're perfectly correct. There is little social condemnation of young people who decide to act out in a manner that is clearly destructive as society attributes these lapses in conduct to youthful restlessness, and adults reminisce about their own youthful days when their own gang of teens went about confounding the adults that cluck-clucked about their refusals to submit to authority and pay tribute to social expectations.

It's recently come to light that a house party in Alta Vista somehow attracted the attention of no fewer than 150 teens who converged on the house, somehow failing to understand that a group of that number would have some difficulties fitting into anyone's home. They made a good deal of noise resulting in neighbours complaining, since no doubt the bulk of the teens were on the outside, celebrating their youthful freedoms to disport themselves as they felt inclined to.

When the police arrived in response to the complaints, the crowd evidently dispersed. An estimated 60 of the original number gathered at Alta Vista Drive and Bank Street, in front of an Independent Grocer supermarket. Doubtless, the bored kids, aspiring nihilists among them, goaded one another into a collective act of public disobedience. To act out dispassionately in a violent manner in full view of onlookers.

Twenty of the assembled teens appear to have taken up the challenge and entered the store which was full of the usual grocery shoppers; mothers with young children, the elderly, just people going about their normal, everyday business of living. In an obvious sign of contempt for the orderly, for respect we all have engrained in us for private and public property, the teens went about knocking items off the shelves that contained them.

Jars of foodstuffs broke, sending their contents everywhere, on the shelves, over the floors, leaving sticky, gooey messes wherever the marauding teens disported themselves in full view of incredulous shoppers, as well as store employees. When the teens had accomplished what they set out to do in defiance of social convention and civility, they simply removed themselves; no great rush to depart, simply a casual departure.

The message clear enough: if you have any argument with what we've done to the order of your day, to the orderly assemblage of food items on neat shelves, to your conception of teens representing immature adults, stop us. No one did. They left, to reassemble with the larger group outside a convenience store, no doubt to relate what they'd done, what the expressions of the bystanders looked like, to the immobility of those who watched, disbelievingly.

And another group later did some damage to a bus at a transit station. Satisfying their impulse to strike out at society, for whatever non-reason. Teens, aimless, valueless, bored, ignorant. Demonstrating their casual contempt, their distaste and their dismissal of societal norms and expectations. These actions don't quite fit into the category of juvenile pranks by restless youth relieving the tedium of a summer evening.

They do express the shiftless, utterly egotistical mindsets of those lacking initiative, respect, imagination, enterprise, and self-restraint. So what are we doing wrong? Deferring to youth, offering them the kind of respect that must be earned. Forgiving unforgivable lapses in social and civil manners.

Raising juvenile delinquents.