View from the Green

By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo

At risk of sounding like an elderly person at the ripe old age of 36, I have to ask the question, “Are the kids today all right?”

When I think back to my teenage years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most reckless thing anyone I knew ever did related to driving a car, and no matter how drunk or high anyone got, no felonies were committed.

Today, it’s a whole different ball game. The once sleepy, small towns of northwest Conn. now have no shortage of kids facing long-term prison sentences for serious crimes.  What has changed in the past two decades?

I think you have to start with the drugs. Not to say that dangerous drugs and alcohol haven’t always been available, but when I was in college, the most potent thing you could buy over-the-counter was ephedra, which was finally banned by the FDA in 2004. Ephedra was simply a stimulant. Nobody was having psychotic episodes from it. These days, designer drugs reign supreme and are making their way into the marketplace through increasingly clever ways.

This synthetic marijuana that Kyle Majewski and Mathew Carey allegedly took before their alleged crime spree on December 17 is marketed as herbal incense. Despite the widespread knowledge that people smoke this product and can experience acute psychosis as the result, the product is still sold in many states. One reason for this is that the drug makers continually outsmart the FDA by quickly creating new ingredients to replace the banned ones, with similar effects. 

Then there is the economy. The loss of hope experienced by young people today who know their job prospects coming out of college, let alone high school, are dim. The negative psychological effect this must have on teenagers today is not to be taken lightly.

And then there’s the disposable culture we’re living in, where nothing is built to last and the inherent value in everything seems to go down with every passing year. If you grow up in a time when everything is constantly being thrown out and replaced with the new, better, faster, more efficient item, how can you place value on anything?

Norfolk resident Michael Kelly recently sent me an article that appeared in the New York Times 109 years ago (on November 10, 1903). The headline was, “After the Cider Drinkers” and the story said, “The Village Improvement Society of Norfolk, Conn. is to undertake a novel plan – that of exterminating drunkards from the town. The summer resort town… has upward of twenty loafers who drink cider, Jamaica ginger, bay rum, perfumery and alcohol when they cannot get whisky. They lie about the byways leading to the golf links and other places and insult women and commit depredations. Recently Mrs. W.F. Stearns, wife of a Norfolk clergyman, lodged a complaint against a hard cider gang… She then appealed to the Village Improvement Society to take up the work of banishing all drunkards from the town by giving a fair-sized reward to any officer every time he made an arrest for intoxication…”

So, clearly this isn’t a new problem. People have always been looking for a buzz in strange places and terrifying town residents with their behavior. Perhaps every generation feels the one coming up behind them is doomed.  Maybe the kids today are all right, after all.