I saw a show on PBS that corroborated Mike Moore`s assertions!
HISTORY & SOCIETY
When rage fuels world's 'lost boys'
By Caryl Rivers, Globe Staff, 2/24/2002
History and current demographic trends give us a new warning: Beware the wrath of boys.
Journalists who covered the fleeing Taliban in Afghanistan commented on how young they were. ''They all look about 12 years old,'' one reporter said. But boys can be deadlier than men, with no life experience to temper their impulses, especially if those impulses are manipulated by older people with a violent agenda.
The Taliban are hardly unique; youth was a hallmark of two other extreme movements of the recent past. In the 1970s, boys barely out of their teens marched urban dwellers from the cities of Cambodia out to the countryside, where 2 million of them labored until they died or were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. During the Cultural Revolution in China in the l960s, Mao's Red Guards were a cadre of mainly teenagers who forced intellectuals, writers, and poets into hard labor and made them confess their ''sins.''
Chaos and instability in society and young men who lack access to good jobs make an incendiary mixture - especially when you throw in messianic ideology or fundamentalist religion. And this may be the forecast for much of the world: boys who inculcate rage against the West, against their own societies, and against women at a very early age.
For example, the religious schools that are springing up all over Pakistan create societies in which young boys are indoctrinated in a fundamentalist brand of Islam that teaches hatred of the West and of Jews. The schools are all-male societies in which the boys have no contact with girls or women - except maybe a mother or an aunt. They develop few social skills and come to regard the opposite sex as alien, the source of sin, uncleanness, and a temptation to male virtue.
But boys don't have to be isolated in such schools to catch the virus of violence. Mohamed Atta, believed to be the pilot of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, came of age in an Egyptian society torn between secularism and modernism. A shy, quiet boy, he had a demanding, arrogant father who called him weak and who demanded that he achieve. But the university degree he earned couldn't get him a job. He ultimately turned to a fanatic brand of religion.
''I almost know Mohamed Atta,'' writes Foujad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, himself Egyptian. With turmoil at home, ''He drifted in infidel lands, but could never be at ease. He led an itinerant life. The magnetic power of the American imperium had fallen across his country. We had intruded into his world. He would shatter the peace of ours.''
The world outside the West is filled with boys who could become Atta. ''They are the lost boys,'' says feminist critic Robin Morgan, ''but they want nothing to do with Wendy or Tinker Bell.'' Some of these young men are being raised, like those in the religious schools, to be alienated from women. Some become so when they are converted to extreme religiosity, like Atta. In times of great upheaval, women become surrogates for society as a whole. The behavior of women is not seen as the action of individuals; women become symbols, surrogates, stand-ins for a host of issues, public and private.
The Afghan woman, who was beaten on the street if her veil slipped an inch, was barred from schooling, work, and not allowed to leave home unless accompanied by a male, is perhaps the extreme example of the rage of boys against women. Many Taliban young men lost their fathers in decades of war. Were they in effect turning on their mothers, the symbols of their fathers' absence and failure?
More of this rage may confront us. In the Arab world, 50 percent of the population is under 25 - much of it composed of restless, angry, alienated, unemployable young men. The demographic picture in many non-Western nations adds to the problem. There are more boys in many places, these days, than girls. In India, the 2001 census shows that only four states out of 28 are not seeing a dwindling number of girls. Bias against girls, and selective abortions of female fetuses (but not male) are common. In rural China, there are 117 boys born for every 100 girls, and many girl babies are abandoned. A trade in kidnapped women for men who can't find brides is thriving.
At the same time, in the Arab world, young men leave their villages to go to the cities and find, too often, underemployment and misery. They also see unveiled women who are educated, who work, and who speak up. To these disaffected young men, the appeal of an Osama bin Laden, with his flowery language about a great and pure Muslim world that is more noble than the one created by the infidels of the West, has great appeal. And in this scenario, women become, once again, not individuals but symbols. Freedom of women becomes the powerlessness of men. Veiled women become the defeat of the West and all that is un-Islamic.
Whether it's the kidnapped young woman in China or the powerless woman in a society that follows strict Islamic law, women have growing reason to fear for their rights in much of the world.
For those who believe the feminist revolution is over, a glance around the world reveals a sobering reality. If poverty, misery, and the failure of democracy mark much of the world, we have a great deal to fear. And angry, displaced, woman-hating boys may be the weapons that we must fear most. If the rage of boys becomes the rule, we are all in for terrible times - but women most of all.
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University.
This story ran on page E2 of the Boston Globe on 2/24/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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