Millennials are paranoid androids, driven mad by fear broadcast straight into our brains since birth. Social programming has made us terrified of everyone and everything. Perhaps this was inevitable for the generation raised by people told to hide under their school desks as nuclear hellfire rained down from on high.
What else could be behind the phenomenon of helicopter parenting, in which a mom or dad stands overtop their child while the kid plays -- or tries to play -- on the local playground? Why else would parents display such behavior? Because we're the Dateline Generation: we grew up with every show on TV telling us that you will be kidnapped by anyone at anytime. Everyone is a suspect. No one is to be trusted. Take that: a shot of terror straight to the heart. Sleep tight.
I talked with my mom recently about why she'd never allow her grandkids the same freedoms she allowed me and my brother. We rode our bikes a half mile to the neighborhood pool and stayed there all day in the summer. No cell phone. No beeper. Just two kids out there, playing wiffle ball and swimming for nine hours a day. No way, my mom said emphatically, would I let kids do that today. It's too dangerous. The world has gone mad. It's never been more dangerous to be alive.
This is hardly a unique view of society in the early years of the 21st century. Almost six in ten U.S. voters said in 2016 that crime had worsened over the previous eight years, when in fact the country had seen a double digit drop in violent and property crime since 2008. Not just a slight dip in criminal activity -- a marked drop (the profitable mass incarceration industry plays an outsized role here, but that's a topic for another meandering blog post).
The data is painfully clear: the violent crime rate for rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault dropped from 80 victimizations per 1,000 people in the US in 1994, to 19 people per 1,000 in 2010. Yes, crime defines many forgotten communities in the United States -- most of them poor with large populations of people of color -- but overall, the nation is far safer today than it was a quarter century ago. That much is inarguable.
And it should come as little surprise that suburb dwellers have the most warped view of crime rates. Why do you think people fled to the suburbs in the first place?
The provably incorrect belief that crime rates had skyrocketed since 2008 was quite naturally more prevalent among Trump voters, 78 percent of whom said crime had worsened during the Obama era. Who could possibly believe criminal activity had plummeted when cable news -- particularly Fox News, which shapes reality for an entire generation of Americans -- broadcasts nonstop footage of the US besieged by crime, by unlawful immigrants and radical feminists and student protesters and Antifa super soldiers and black folks protesting police killings?
TV and the internet don't just create reality: they are reality. Lived experience doesn't matter. Media is what's real, and media shows us a never ending loop of American carnage. Americans' overestimation of crime rates in 2016 was nothing new. We always think the world is way more dangerous than it really is.
Hence, millennials hover forever over their children, terrified to their core that they too could end up on Dateline as the mom or dad of the child who was abducted. It's only when I consider this phenomenon that I realize how steeped in fear we are as a people. Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise: fear drives us toward a quiet, comfortable suburban life. Fear drives us to take jobs we hate. Fear ensures we don't lend support to people who so desperately need it, terrified that we might lose the little that we've gained (read Rules for Radicals for more on the plight of the Have A Little Want Mores). We've received the message loud and clear: Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
I'm not immune to the bone-crushing fear pulsating at the center of our culture. I find myself hovering over my kids at the playground for fear of being the crying dad on the local news begging for the safe return of his kid, the dad whose life was ruined by a moment of inattention. I fear that the proverbial shoe will drop at any moment, shattering me and my family. I fear the unknowable. I'm aware of fear's effects on my everyday decisions though, and maybe that's good. Maybe that'll help me keep the fear from my mind, which malfunctions when terror takes hold. Maybe.