At midnight when I am asleep tonight in the Pacific Time Zone I will become an octogenarian. I was wondering today if I should rethink my way of considering those people who are under the age of twenty, the people we call teenagers. For most of my professional life I lived with those people. They passed through their teenage years and became young adults; and I watched them became middle aged persons before they became “senior citizens” eligible to receive Social Security income.  Those first students I taught when they were in high school are now eligible for medical assistance from Government because they are past the age of sixty-two. 

I am trying to figure out in what ways the people who are young today are like those people whom I taught when they were sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. I am trying to remember how a radicalized young man or young woman in 1959 expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo. They didn’t live through the awful Second World War. They knew about global conflicts in Korea and were becoming aware of Southeast Asian resistance to Western dominance.  In 1969 I moved to Singapore for four years and witnessed first hand the Southeastern Asian conflicts.  I continued to work with young people. In 1974 I moved to my nation’s capital… wondering what kinds of adults young people would become. 

In the L.A. Times early this week I read an op-ed piece about “the Young and Radicalized” in the West.  

“It’s no longer shocking to hear that young men and women raised in the West have left the comforts of home for the turmoil of Iraq and ‘Syria, eager to fight on behalf of Islamic State.  But still we can’t figure out how to dissuade them.

Ask any expert in the field and you’re likely to get a long disquisition on the various profiles of foreign fighters.  Some are from poor suburbs; some are from middle-class families.  Some are converts: some are born muslim.  Some come from broken homes; some come from intact families.  Some are loners who struggle at school; some are popular overachievers.  Some were radicalized  online, others by someone they met in person.  Some, often boys, are running from their problems; others, often girls, are running from the strictures of a conservative home.”

“There is, however, one thing that most of these foreign recruits have in common:  They are very young.”