Letters to the Editor
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Knicker-twisting and D&D
As someone who has played D&D well into my adulthood, and someone who is a good parent, a homeowner and an all-around good citizen, and as someone who has a healthy enough respect for anti-authoritarianism to rival any punk, here's the thing:
Getting your knickers in a twist about what the author has to say based on the fact that she (like a good many people) demonstrates a deeep ignorance of what role playing games really have to do with the creation of the "street family" phenomenon is just as bad as attributing the rise of the "street family" phenomenon to D&D in the first place.
However dubious the author's understanding of these groups, the fact of the matter is that they exist, and their violence and cultish social structures, fueled by drugs and paranoia, are reason to be alarmed. Sure, some of these kids arrive on the street already broken by crappy parents and other kinds of trauma. Some arrive with romantic notions that a life on the street is somehow more "authentic" than a life working at Starbucks. However they get there, the end result is the same -- they end up trapped in a life that robs them of health and the ability to make their own decisions about their destiny. Far from creating them as healthy, whole people, they end up engaging in violence, numbing themselves with drugs, and often in jail and with no options for a future.
Brushing it off as just another misunderstood counterculture movement is a bit nonchalant and short-sighted. You don't have to kowtow to mindless commercialism to be alarmed by the notion of people destroying thier lives with drugs and violence. Wanting people to be healthy and whole is the best that humans can want for each other.
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THANK you.
There have always been people who couldn't or wouldn't play by the rules of modern society and spend their lives in conditions that most of us would reject.
Absolutely. Scruffy urban subcultures, even criminal scruffy urban subcultures, are nothing new; they've been around as long as "urban" has been a meaningful designation.
I think the shock and horror about "street kids" (who aren't even kids, come on now) is informed by two factors: they're young and they're white. Denfield pays some PC lip service to the idea that law enforcement would pay more attention to the "kids" if they were black, which is probably true. However, that idea goes hand-in-hand with the fact that white grownups don't expect their suburban scions to be "bad" in the same way that black and Latino kids are. Do people really expect that "their kids" will be so very different from everyone else's kids? Whiteness is not a protective talisman against this sort of thing.
Grownups also like to shit on teenagers, and "street kids" are a convenient example of "bad kids" who everybody should be scared of. Yawn. Nothing new there, except for that these kids aren't even kids. 19 and 20-year-olds are adults, legally and biologically. But hey, who wants to deprive paranoid, "respectable" adults of their fun?
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Thank you, angelle.....
.....for bringing some light to go along with all of Denfeld's blustery heat.
I was set to post something, but it would have been rooted in second- and third-person interpretations; angelle's is illuminating because it speaks from firsthand experience.
And as for Denfeld's spastic grasping at "gaming" and "D&D" as even tangentially-related to the perennially embattled lot of the young and impoverished, she's operating from the same hell-in-handbasket *quality* of insight that, in past generations, gave us 'Reefer Madness'.....
total.....fucking.....cluelessness.....
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Get over the D&D reference already
I'm sure the author only mentions D&D as a general reference that people over 25 and outside of the RPG scene could understand. You really need to get out more if that reference threatens you and your 12-sided dice so much. There are more serious errors in the article(1.5 million street kids?).
The more important point, which I'm not sure the author addresses, is that there are white kid street gangs out there comparable to the much hyped Black, Latin and Asian gangs. Most members of any gang don't actually commit violent attacks outside of their group, and its probably the same with the street kids. Most members of any gang join to have other guys to hang out with(the same reason men the same age join fraternities, secret societies etc. at colleges) not to bash heads or shoot up bystanders.
If there is less violence with white street kid gangs, its probably because they staked out safer, less contested turf. The sidewalk in front of the GAP on a yuppie shopping street, instead of in front of a corner grocery in a neighborhood changing from Black to Mexican. Furthermore these street kid gangsters can blend in by changing their clothes, in a way non-white gang members cannot, making them less visible as a gang to police and society. Especially to shoplift from the upscale stores they panhandle in front of. Where do you think all that new merchandise for sale on Ebay comes from, now that most reputable resale shops check ID?
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nihilism
At 19, I existed on the outskirts of the street kid culture. I was at college in the USA as an international student, still being financially supported by my parents. I came from an "adequate home." Looking at it objectively, I don't know how much more adequate you could have judged it to be - my parents had enough money to send me to college full ride. I didn't have a job, I had an allowance.
My father was an alcoholic who drank to blackout almost every night. My mother made it a practice to go to sleep by 7pm to avoid his rages. Things had been this way since I was 14. Nobody knew.
Why the street? No expectations, no judgment, nobody holding my "good name" over my head. Nobody telling me to go to a church I knew to be a rotten shell, rife with hypocrisy. Nobody leaning on me to be "respectable," get a boyfriend, get married, have kids, wear pink, smile like a good Stepford Wife, and end up trapped like my mother. I liked the easiness of hanging out with people who had no alliance to conventional morality. Meth was still small-time; I smoked a lot of pot and dropped acid and mushrooms. My friends and boyfriends had rap sheets. I got busted, too.
I realized after a little while that freedom from conventional morality often translated as "completely untrustworthy." As much as I did not trust my parents, I couldn't trust these kids either. I didn't trust them - it was OK - I didn't trust anyone - if you trusted people, you were an idiot, right? Fuck life, fuck this shit, fuck everything. Don't underestimate the nihilism that underscores street life.
My husband, who was a punk during the 80s in DC, was also a nihilist in his time - for slightly less personal and more political reasons - but I found it amusing that Denfeld characterizes punk as "artistic." I don't see much difference between the forces that drew my husband to punk and myself to what retrospectively looks like a kind of proto-emo, goth-inflected, hippie-wastoid lifestyle.
I have read a few letters here that have a real pessimism about them, and that's the last thing the problem needs. I'm still alive because I was stubborn enough to create my own basis for optimism, reject the sticky embrace of psychosis, and learn how to be moral without giving my heart as a burnt offering on the pyre of dogma. I wish I knew how to help other people do this, too.