You know, I do get it. Kids are obnoxious. Mr. A and I once looked at an apartment not too far from our local high school, and at the time school had just let out and crowds of students were walking past shrieking and yelling to each other and on their phones and such (with their long hair and their rock music) and we both looked at each other and said, erm, no.
(Then we moved next door to crackheads, and I think sometimes it can’t be any better than the kids, really.)
But facts are, kids are kids, and they have to go somewhere:
CINCINNATI –As you walk through the doors at Tri-County Mall on
a Friday or Saturday night you’ll now see security guards checking
identification for everyone who looks under 25. It’s all part of the
new Youth Escort Policy. The new rules require anyone under the age of
18 to have an escort with them 21 years of age or older.The policy applies every Friday and Saturday from 4 p.m. to close.
Management at Tri-County Mall says it should make for a more pleasant shopping experience for their customers.
“Being
youth, and being in large numbers unsupervised, they tend to get loud
and rowdy and detract from a comfortable shopping atmosphere.,” said
General Manager Michael Lyons. To enforce the rules, there will be
extra security at every entrance of the mall.
Increasingly in America our public spaces are really private spaces, controlled and policed, and run by lazy managers who don’t want to deal with troublemakers on a one-on-on basis because that would require hiring intelligent security and making them work. Which leaves teenagers who want to go to the mall with their friends feeling like they have something to rebel against, and maybe this is me remembering being 14, but goddamn if that isn’t Christmas morning.
(Besides which, I’d much rather deal with crowds of shrieky Twilight fans than hordes of people pushing double-wide strollers and stopping for nice long chats at the bottom of the escalator, but I’m not fond of the mall anyway, so it seems silly for me to make the rules. My idea of an ideal shopping experience is to go on a Tuesday at 10 a.m. the second the stores open and be gone by 10:30 so as to avoid the stupidity.)
My ‘hood has lots of parks, rec centers and other places for kids to go, and a couple of commercial areas instead of enclosed malls, but the teen hangouts are generally the hot dog stands and such. Which I’m sure upsets some people my age and older, but you know what? Tough shit. If you never let the kids out in public how the hell are they supposed to learn how to behave? If people are getting into fights or vandalizing property the answer isn’t to hassle everybody, it’s to arrest the ones committing crimes and calm the fuck down.
The only thing I wonder about with this is that lots and lots of mall stores cater to young people. I’m surprised not to see any pushback from the stores that are hoping to make their money from the Abercrombie demographic.
A.