Kids nowadays have fewer outlets for anger

Here’s some fun free-speech trivia for the “Jeopardy!” buffs at home: Three kinds of speech… Here’s some fun free-speech trivia for the “Jeopardy!” buffs at home: Three kinds of speech are illegal — defamation, intentionally lying or invading someone’s privacy; speech that might spur someone to immediate violence; and threatening the president.

That last one is kind of like trying to name that other guy in one of the Roman triumvirates. Most people can get the first two but struggle to come up with that crucial third.

A kid at Freeport High School, located about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, apparently didn’t know that last detail, and is now in Butler County Juvenile Center because of it.

The Secret Service arrested a 16-year-old sophomore for allegedly making threats against the president and his classmates on his Web journal, according to the Valley News Dispatch. While the arrest was locally reported in the Tribune-Review and by KDKA, the Secret Service would not confirm the investigation.

Now, the news on this isn’t too clear, other than that the kid’s in custody and that his class president didn’t think he was dangerous, although he did mention that, “he did his hair different” — styled into a Mohawk.

But shouldn’t there be some chain of command, some intermediate authority between the Buffalo Township police and the Secret Service? If this kid made the threats he’s charged with, there should have been an of intervening school official or counselor, so that he didn’t end up in kiddie jail, a place guaranteed to make him dislike authority even more.

I’m calling this kid a kid for a reason. Sixteen is a difficult age. You wake up and the world seems to suck beyond the telling of it, especially if you’re a kid who does his hair differently. I’m certainly not trying to legitimize threats or violence against anyone — I may resent authority but I abhor violence.

Still, I can’t help feeling sorry for this kid and the situation in which he’s now mired. I can’t know what’s going through his mind; 16-year-olds are inscrutable, even to themselves.

We write a lot about high school issues in this newspaper, because, for many of us, memories of that time are fresh, often painfully so. We also write about these because, cliche as it is to say, high school represents a microcosm of society. Education, violence, speech and the media’s influence — all these issues intersect, sometimes well, sometimes disastrously.

I wasn’t a particularly happy teen. I managed to escape the city high school to a humanities magnet originally designed to help kids who would have dropped out of, or been miserable in, regular school. By the time I got there, it had become more focused on college prep, but thankfully some of that original mission lingered.

This kid didn’t have the luxury of a small school. Freeport High School’s Web site mentions that the school enrolls about 700 students, more than twice the number at my high school. But this can’t just be a size issue. I know plenty of maladjusts from suburban high schools who never ended up in juvie.

Perhaps it’s the current cultural climate. When I was a mere high school student, society seemed more accepting of the anger and disaffection that come with being 16. If I ever needed a role model, I just clicked on the television and there were Daria, Buffy, and Angela from “My So-Called Life,” telling me that, yeah, being this age sucks and things would get better. While quality TV still exists, most of the teens in the tiny pictures seem perfect, rich and skinny — not exactly the cynics who gave me a template for what smart women could be.

And of course, there was always music. Songs screamed out of the radio, as skinny boys in flannel shirts strangled their guitars at us. At the risk of sounding like the crotchety 70-year-old I seem so destined to become, I’ll venture that some of that anger has been leeched away, at least from mainstream music. Much of emo sounds like whining set to bad synth beats; I want to give those skinny boys a decent meal, not scream along with them.

Maybe it’s not the media, though the social Democrat in me wants to blame external forces. My inner individualist wants this to be someone’s fault. From the reports, this kid seems unhappy and angry, and like he tried to direct his anger at something, namely an authority figure. Of course, being 16, you live in hyperbole, so his alleged threats were aimed at the president.

I’m sorry, kid, if you’re feeling alone and miserable. I’m sorry that we now treat teen-aged fits of pique with deeper gravity than we do terrorists buying weapons at gun shows. I’m sorry if you were just trying to vent and now you have a record and a court date. I’m sorry that life at 16 sucks so much, and that our society’s repression, paranoia and homogeneity make it suck more.

In case anyone hasn’t told you: It gets better. That doesn’t help much now, but things will get better, easier. Just hold on until they do.

Sydney Bergman has never been arrested for sassiness. Mouth off to her at sbergman@pittnews.com.