Osama’s adolescents

Consider the 20-year-old California Talib (John Walker) now a warship “detainee,” and the 15-year-old Tampa suicide pilot (Charles Bishop) in death a reported admirer of Osama bin Laden. What to make of these two seemingly decent kids, both notably intelligent, who in different but extremely definitive ways chose paths unimaginable to most Americans? What genie (from the Arabic djinn) could have gotten into them?

This column begins with condolence for their families. The cause of their grief and, doubtless, their remorse is simply beyond my scope of experience.

My life has, however, included two relevant domains. Readers have already suffered this writer’s observations on Afghanistan and Islam. John Walker and Charles Bishop recall another realm: three decades of privileged service as a secondary-school teacher. No non-adolescent, including myself, really knows adolescents, but I know kids (my thousands of former students) better than I know Kabul or the Holy Qoran. So what got into John Walker and Charles Bishop?

By way of contrast, let’s first examine Afghanistan and the life of young people in that traditional, pre-industrial, overwhelmingly rural culture. Extended family remains the ideal: three (or more) generations headed by a patriarch and with household populations well into double figures. And “family” entails much more than the essentially emotional arrangements which link us together – and drive us nuts – in the West.

“Family” does in Afghanistan what government does in the West: education of the young, social security for the old, support for poor relations, and (most crucial in that unruly land) defense against outside attack. Forget public schools, monthly checks, food stamps and police; even in the best of times, only schools and police existed … and these only barely.

Everyone in the family – and here’s the main point – contributes. Adults do most of the production and, within wedlock, all of the reproduction. Elders provide wisdom in a society which, until recently, has changed slowly and thus values the experience of prior generations. Young people, beginning at 6 or 7, perform what we’d call “chores” which, by the time they’re 11 or 12, are indispensable to household welfare. Little girls help their mothers (or other resident mothers) with still younger children. Little boys care for livestock herds, literally the family “stock” portfolio, during daily grazing.

The key word here is “indispensable.” Most Afghan families can’t get along without their kids. There’s too much work and too few machines. True, the kids quite frequently don’t go to school – hopefully soon to change – but they learn something that no lesson plan can provide: a realization of their own concrete value, their own home-rooted indispensability. We call such feeling “authentic self-esteem” … and wish our adolescents had more of it.

Adolescence, as we structure it, scarcely existed when I lived in the Afghan hinterland. Mom and Dad (and other family adults) needed the kids, assumed them trustworthy, never (as we systematically do) underrated their potential for contribution, and thus apportioned them vital responsibilities to perform. The kids, like most people everywhere, conformed to expectations. They did what the culture told them was important: They performed. And, in the process, they contributed indispensably and undeniably to something bigger than themselves.

This sense of youthful capacity and responsibility survived war and its social upheavals. In recent years I’ve administered a 12th-grade U.S. scholarship for Muslim youth. To date the program has chosen seven teen-age Afghans. Every single one had, at the time of selection, been working full-time at what we’d call “adult” positions … in addition to getting whatever formal education was available. The first (at 18) was a professional journalist and volunteer mujahid in the anti-Soviet holy war. Another had sold pencils as an 11-year-old on the streets of Tehran and, when I met him, was running a U.S.-sponsored assistance program whose American boss had been evacuated during the Gulf War. Another (not quite 18) had graduated from a makeshift secondary school and then founded, from scratch, his own school – for girls.

Now what about the world of John Walker and Charles Bishop? What has their culture – our culture – told them is important? What does it expect?

Here we don’t mean the up-front words of parents, teachers or preachers. (“Express yourself, but be good. Have fun in school, but ace the college boards.”) Rather we mean the subtler messages which inhere within day-to-day life, the implicit assumptions which structure American adolescence. Albeit unintentionally – and in the language of actions not words – we send our kids two such messages.

The first message is that they’re not needed … except in the fragile domain of emotions. Certainly they’re not needed in the concrete, immediate, indispensable sense felt positively by young Afghans. Most middle-class American kids exist – and are expected to exist – pretty much as passive consumers. They consume food, clothes and gadgets cynically crafted and merchandized to fill psychological holes. Even at top tuition schools they basically consume education (and regurgitate it at test time) in what amounts to a long-term investment by parents whose return will be solely emotional. The parental hope: If we invest now, our child will be successful and happy later … and we parents (if still alive and solvent) will be happy as a result. Until then – typically for two decades plus – it’s all give for the parents and all take for the child. Message for the child: My purpose and true value, if any, is deferred. Consequence: lack of substantive self-esteem.

It’s true, obviously, that our specialized economy requires years of specialized education. Also true but less frequently recognized is the resulting pattern of adolescent emptiness. Kids, like the rest of us, want to count for something. You don’t get the feeling of counting in life by being a passive consumer for your first 20-odd years.

The second message is consistent with this felt lack of value: that life – or at least adolescent life – is profoundly trivial. What other lesson could possibly be absorbed from the utter vacuity of teen-age pop culture? Sensing profit and wishing to extend it, merchandisers keep our kids dumbed-down and demanding as long as possible. Madison Avenue does its best to addict them. Parents pay most of the credit-card charges. The whole family pays psychologically. And for what? A gospel of brand names and Britney Spears and/or hip-hop.

John Walker may – or may not – be guilty of serious legal crimes. He did, however, exceed our adolescent cultural norms in A) searching for purpose in his mid-teens and B) taking life very seriously. True, he kept asking his father for money and, true, his search led to the Taliban. But, as an old schoolmaster, I’ve known many incipient John Walkers and am loath to judge some of my best students. If there’s to be judgment of this young American, let’s also put on trial the adult-structured phenomenon of American adolescence, complete with its unspoken messages and assumptions.

About Charles Bishop, who crashed a small plane into a skyscraper on Jan. 5, we’ve heard only tidbits. Here I depend mostly on his hometown paper, the Tampa Tribune. The 15-year-old is variously described as “a little dazed” (fellow student), “happy kid … who smiled a lot” (another fellow student), “very patriotic” (best friend), “very troubled” (police chief), “respectful, decent and polite” (older neighbor), “gangly, intelligent, articulate” (flight school teacher), “a good boy” (journalism teacher), “my shining star” (his grieving mother who deserves more distance from media vultures).

Why is Mrs. Bishop not let alone? Because, reportedly, her son’s suicide note “expresses sympathy for Osama bin Laden.” No one, mercifully, suggests that Charles was an agent for al-Qaida. And it’s entirely possible, as many psycho-pundits do suggest, that the bin Laden

reference had no serious meaning.

But what if it did? Could it be that Charles Bishop had something in common with John Walker? That, despite being young, he was a serious person in search of serious purpose? And that he couldn’t find it in a culture that asks too little of concrete value from kids … and thus gives them too little self-value in return? Was a desire for seriousness the genie that got into John and Charles?

Osama is our sworn enemy and a mass killer and the worst possible exemplar of committed seriousness. But he’s absolutely serious. Did his seriousness have distorted appeal for two of our own kids? And, if so, what does it say about us?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.