The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [79]
In tracing the history of scares several times I found that they stay around and reproduce themselves the way mosquitoes do, by attaching to whomever is available. By the mid-1980s, in line with the anti-1960s sentiment of the era, TV news programs had already started running reports that recycled footage of hippies in Haight Ashbury and characterized boomers as “dropping out and getting high” in the 1960s, only to drop back in as parents, “still getting high ... teaching the next generation to self-destruct, one line, one drink, one toke at a time” (CBS, 1986). That the negative image of “flower children ... educating their own teen-aged children about drugs” (as an article in the Detroit News put it in 1996) had little basis in reality mattered not at all. Only a minuscule portion of the baby boom generation ever qualified as “flower children” in the first place, and far fewer were potheads than myth would have it. But such facts did not stop news correspondents from rewriting boomers’ drug history and current attitudes toward drug use.16
“The children of the sixties have kids of their own and a new conflict with the generation gap. This time, it’s about their own drug use and what to tell their children about their past,” Deborah Roberts proclaimed on ABC’s “20/20” in 1997 as a Jefferson Airplane song played in the background and stock footage of hippies filled the screen. Boomer parents who had gotten high in their youth are in a no-win situation, Roberts suggested. They can take a ”do as I say, not as I did” approach and risk being branded hypocrites by their children, or they can lie about their drug use and sacrifice any right to demand honesty from their kids in return.17
Roberts and her producers apparently paid no mind to evidence showing that few parents actually experienced that dilemma. A year before the “20/20” broadcast a nationwide survey found that 40 percent of parents had never tried marijuana, and more than three-quarters believed that a parent should never allow a child to take drugs. Fewer than one in ten said they felt hypocritical in forbidding their own children from using drugs. Most seemed to feel the way Bill Clinton did when ABC’s Peter Jennings suggested on another ABC program that ”a lot of people at home,” knowing he’s “a baby boomer president,” consider it hypocritical of him to tell Chelsea to avoid drugs. ”I think this business about how the baby boomers all feel too guilt-ridden to talk to their kids,” a slightly exasperated Clinton replied, “is the biggest load of hooey I ever heard.18
Although scares about boomer parents have popped up frequently, they boil down to a non sequitur: “Many baby-boomer parents of teen drug users probably used drugs themselves, and therefore have not offered stern enough warnings about the dangers” (New York Times, 1996). The first part of the statement is true, but the second doesn’t follow; most boomers who have used drugs say they have cautioned their kids about the dangers. Should they have been more stern in their warnings? Not if adolescent drug use is a form of rebellion, as some experts believe. Parents who make a big deal about drugs might provoke more of the behavior they are attempting to prevent.19
This Is the Media on Drugs
Hectoring is exactly what parents have been told they should do. “Every time that a parent is with their child, it’s an opportunity for them to discuss drugs,” a physician from the American Academy of Pediatrics urged with a straight face on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 1997. Parents who took his prescription literally must have had some curious interchanges with their offspring: “That’s great news about your straight A’s, let’s talk about LSD.”20
Presumably the doctor himself would acknowledge the absurdity