HOW CHILDREN FAIL :Fear and Failure.
Yesterday, three young boys were riding the subway to Park Street. They were exceedingly noisy, excited, and rude. They may not have been "delinquents," but they looked as if they could have been, and certainly as if they wanted the rest of us to think they were. The sudden contact with them was shocking. They seemed so far from what we are used to in people, so close to wild animals- but that is a libel on animals. It was hard not to feel that there was no open door through which they could be reached. About them in the car was an aura of stiff and anxious resentment, which they seemed to recognize and enjoy. People were mentally drawing their skirts and coattails aside.As I watched these boys, I began to see them as they were. Each time one of them said or did something to shock the people in the car, he looked quickly and anxiously at the faces of his companions, to see whether he had won their approval. Then it would be the turn of another to try to outdo him in noisiness and rowdiness, and to look for his approval in tum. It was suddenly clear that these boys were alone, anxious, frightened, and ready to do anything, anything at all, that would, if only for a moment, gain them the approval of their fellows. For their security they had nothing but each other, and they were so anxious that they had almost no security to give. Every time one of them laughed at another's joke, his laughter was almost instantly cut short by the need to do something that would make the other laugh at him. Their approval of each other almost instantly soured into jealousy.
What did these boys have to nourish their self-respect and self-esteem besides the short-lived and uneasy approval they gave each other? Only the palpable disapproval of everyone else around them, a disapproval close to fear. If you can't make people like you, it is something to be able to make them afraid of you.
Harrison Salisbury, in The Shook-Up Generation, and Warren Miller, in The Cool World, describe, the former as reporter, the latter as novelist, the world of the delinquent. It appears from what they say that even in the most tightly knit street gangs there is little of what we would call friendship. Gang members are no more than uneasy allies, welded together partly by fear of the world outside and partly by the certain knowledge that nobody else in the world gives a damn about them.