So where are we going? Some people fear we are polarizing into a two-class nation, rich and poor. More precisely, a privileged knowledge-producing class and a low-paid, low-status service class. It is in the public high school that this division of labor for an emergent postindustrial local economy is first articulated. At the top are the kids who will hold jobs in a highly competitive technological economic order, who will advance and be respected if they cooperate and excel.
At the bottom are kids with poor basic skills, short attention spans, limited emotional investment in the future. Also poor housing, poor nutrition, bad schooling, bad lives. And in their bad jobs they will face careers of unsatisfying part-time work, low pay, no benefits, and no opportunity for advancement.
There are the few possibilities offered by a relative—a coveted place in a union, a chance to join a small family business in a service trade, a spot in a small shop. In my neighborhood, kids dream of making a good score on the cop tests, working up from hostess to waitress. Most hang out in limbo hoping to get called for a job in the sheriff’s department, or the parks, or sanitation. They’re on all the lists, although they know the odds for getting called are slim. The lists are frozen, the screening process is endless.
Meantime they hold jobs for a few months here and there, or they work off the books, or at two bad jobs at once….
When he gave the eulogy at his godson’s funeral, Tommy Olton’s uncle Richard was quoted as saying: When I held you in my arms at your baptism, I wanted it to be a fresh start, for you to be more complete than we had ever been ourselves, but I wonder if we expected too much. In thinking only of ourselves, maybe we passed down too great a burden.
Trans-historically, cross-culturally, humans have placed enormous burdens on their young. Sometimes these burdens have been primarily economic: The child contributes to the economy of the family or tribe. Sometimes the burden has been social—the child is a contribution to the immortality of our creed. Be fruitful and multiply.
But the spiritual burden we pass on to the child may be the most difficult to bear. We do expect them to fulfill an incompleteness in ourselves, in our world. Our children are our vehicle for the realization of unfulfilled human dreams: our class aspirations, our visions of social justice and world peace, of a better life on earth.
Faith in the child, in the next generation, helps get us through this life. Without this hope in the future through the child we could not endure slavery, torture, war, genocide, or even the ordinary, everyday grind of a “bad life.” The child-as-myth is an empty slate upon which we carve our highest ideals. For human beings, the child is God, utopia, and the future incarnate. The Bergenfield suicide pact ruptured the sacred trust between the generations. It was a negation.
After I had been to Bergenfield, people asked me: Why did they do it? People want to know in 25 words or less. But it’s more complicated than that. I usually just say: They had bad lives, and try to explain why these lives ended where, when, and how they did. But I still wonder, at what point are people pushed over the line?
On the surface the ending of the four kids’ bad lives can be explained away by the “case history” approach. Three of the four had suicidal or self-destructive adult role models: the suicide of Tommy Olton’s father, the drug-related death of the Burress sisters’ father. Tommy Rizzo, along with his three friends, had experienced the recent loss of a beloved friend, Joe Major. Before Joe, the death of three other local “burnouts.” Then there was the chronic drug and alcohol abuse, an acknowledged contributing factor in suicide. Families ruptured by divorce, death, estrangement. Failure at school.
But these explanations alone would not add up to a suicide pact among four kids. If they did, the teenage suicide rate would be much, much higher. The personal problems experienced by the four kids were severe, painful, but by the 1980s, they were no longer remarkable.
For a while I wondered if the excessive labeling process in Bergenfield was killing off the “burnouts.” Essentially, their role, their collective identity in their town was that of the [outcaste]. Us and Them, the One and the Other. And once they were constituted as “burnouts” by the town’s hegemonic order, the kids played out their assigned role as self-styled outcasts with irony, style, and verve.
Yes, Bergenfield was guilty of blaming the victim. But only slightly more guilty than any other town. Labeling, blaming the victim, and conferring rewards on more cooperative kids was cruel, but also not remarkable in the eighties.
As I felt from the beginning, the unusually cloying geography of Bergenfield seemed somehow implicated in the suicide pact. The landscape appeared even more circumscribed because of the “burnouts’” lack of legitimate space in the town: they were too old for the [roller skating] Rink, and the Building [an abandoned warehouse taken over by the teens] was available for criminal trespass only. Outcast, socially and spatially, for years the “burnouts” had been chased from corner to parking lot, and finally, to the garage bays of Foster Village. They were nomads, refugees in the town of their birth. There was no place for them. They felt unloved, unwanted, devalued, disregarded, and discarded.
But this little town, not even two miles long from north to south, was just a dot on a much larger map. It wasn’t the whole world. Hip adults I know, friends who grew up feeling like outcasts in their hometown, were very sympathetic to the plight of the “burnouts.” Yet even they often held out one last question, sometimes contemptuously: Why didn’t they just leave? As if the four kids had failed even as outcasts. My friends found this confusing: No matter how worthless the people who make the rules say you are, you don’t have to play their game. You can always walk and not look back, they would argue. People who feel abject and weird in their hometown simply move away.
But that has always been a class privilege. The townies are the poor kids, the wounded street warriors who stay behind. And besides, escape was easier for everyone 20 years ago. American society had safety nets then that don’t exist now—it’s just not the same anymore.
During the eighties, dead-end kids—kids with personal problems and unspectacular talents living in punitive or indifferent towns with a sense of futility about life—became more common. There were lots of kids with bad lives. They didn’t all commit suicide. But I believe that in another decade, Tommy Rizzo, Cheryl Burress, Tommy Olton, and Lisa Burress would not have “done it.” They might have had more choices, or choices that really meant something to them. Teenage suicide won’t go away until kids’ bad lives do. Until there are other ways of moving out of bad lives, suicide will remain attractive.
Notes
1. As I promised the kids I met hanging out on the streets of Bergen County and on Long Island, “No names, no pictures.” Names such as “Joe,” “Eddie,” and “Doreen” are fictitious, changed to protect their privacy.
Reading 3 An Intersection Of Biography And History: My Intellectual Journey
Mary Romero
This selection by Mary Romero is another example of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination. Romero is a professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, where she teaches sociology and Chicano studies. In this excerpt, Romero explains how biography and history influenced her investigation of domestic service work done by Chicanas. In particular, she describes her research process, which involved reinterpreting her own and others’ domestic service experiences within the larger work history of Mexican Americans and the devaluation of housework. Thus, this selection is from the introduction to Romero’s 1992 book, Maid in the U.S.A., a study of domestic work and the social interactions between domestics and their employers.
When I was growing up many of the women whom I knew worked cleaning other people’s houses. Domestic service was part of my taken-for-granted reality. Later, when I had my own place, I considered housework something you did before company came over. My first thought that domestic service and housework might be a serious research interest came as a result of a chance encounter