Is this a fix for U.S. teen mass shooters? We are losing our 18-year-olds, especially men. A universal ‘gap year’ could help

Headline and subhead taken from the Will Bunch newsletter

Before the 2020 election, reading all the polls that called for a Democratic landslide, feeling optimistic, I started writing a piece on the necessity of refocusing on civic engagement and development of a sense of community and collective purpose ("Civic involvement and national service as a way to rebuild a sense of collective community").

But other than Trump losing to Biden, the election results were dismal.  Mostly, Democrats loss key seats--barely holding on to the House and seemingly not getting control of the Senate*. So I was seriously "depressed" and didn't finish the piece.

I do need to get back to it, although the way our system privileges minoritarian control of the Senate, Electoral College, and now the Supreme Court, I am not particularly hopeful anymore about the prospect and promise of "America"--although I still feel compelled to try to improve things. 

One reason to finish the piece is because Will Bunch, the opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, makes a brilliant point in this week's e-letter, that a way to deal with the anomie of young men is a national gap year ("Is this a fix for U.S. teen mass shooters?").  From the article:

But today I want to focus on the other commonality — that each of these mass murderers was a young man in the 18-21 age bracket, and that each had a similar biography in which their time after high school seemed a descent into an abyss of domestic violence at home and weird conspiracy theorizing or posturing on the internet. ...

America’s young men didn’t always go off the grid so easily and so often. A few decades ago, in a time when the rate of college attendance was lower, there were also more decent, better-paying job opportunities for teens looking to enter the workforce, which fostered the ability to establish a home or get married at a younger age, in working-class communities that felt more stable. Today, this cohort is increasingly lost and in crisis. ...

Young people who don’t attend college — but again, especially men — also are increasingly prone to so-called “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, suicide, or alcohol abuse. Yet many young people who do better academically are also stressed out to the max from the pressure they feel to get into “the right college,” or because of the exorbitant loans many need to pay for it. Even an elite campus like the University of Pennsylvania can struggle with suicide.

Part of the issue might be what I sometimes call “the college problem” in America — a shorthand for how the dream of higher education instead became a source of resentment for some and anxiety for others, and how these bitter reactions have fueled our political divide. But calling it a “college problem” undersells the real issue: the U.S. abandons its young citizens at age 18.

We need to broaden our ideas of what higher education — both in terms of job training, including trade school, but also critical thinking — can become, and to make this a “public good” like K-12 education. That could take the form of a so-called “gap year” for 18-year-olds of universal, mostly civilian (such as working on environmental projects or in public schools) national service, funded by the government.

The benefits of such a program would run well beyond spruced-up national parks. Instead of falling off the grid, 18-year-olds would be getting a helping hand to find themselves and maybe find something they love. The widespread acceptance of a “gap year” could encourage us to stop putting so much pressure on these teens to “figure it all out” their senior year of high school. If well run, programs like the proposed Civilian Climate Corps would bring together young people from the silos they now live in — including, yes, “red states” and “blue states” — and have them working toward a common purpose.

“We need to be reintroduced to each other in a place where we are all on the same team,” the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason wrote in a 2019 essay, along with her observation that a study showed Korean War veterans who fought in newly desegregated units came home scoring higher in racial tolerance than those who did not. Today, we’re very good at knowing everything that’s wrong with America, and terrible at doing anything about it. Universal civilian national service is one way of doing something about it.

 You should be reading Will Bunch anyway, but in particular this is a brilliant insight.  It's the basic argument in my half-written piece, about connection between otherwise dissimilar people, but I hadn't made the leap to the violence, adoption of conspiratorial outlooks, etc., that is fostered by this, especially by the people who don't go to college, and in the interim, aren't doing much else.,

Apparently Will Bunch's forthcoming book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — And How To Fix It, has a chapter on national service.

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* It seemed likely the Democrats would lose the Senate because while both Senate seats in Georgia were thrown into a runoff because of a fluke, previously Democrats pretty much lost in runoffs.  But it turned out on January 5th both Democratic candidates won.  Halelulah.  

The next day was the Insurrection, so I returned to my political depression, which has only been made worse by Krysten Sinema ("Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema More Popular With Republicans Than Her Own Party, Polls Suggest," Forbes) and Joe Manchin ("Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy," Washington Post) basically handing control of the Senate to the Republicans, and the rise of the theocratic majority on the Supreme Court.   

Manchin and Sinema basically doom the Midterms--I see the Democrats losing both the Senate and House, in part because of inflation, but also because of the failure to move a Democratic agenda forward + the Supreme Court.