Let the Red Holidays of Genius Begin

Late yesterday afternoon, the Brooklyn Eagle broke the news that parents of the teens who started the fire that burned down P.S. 29's jungle gym had created a fund to pay for it. The families' lawyer said the fire was the result of "horseplay gone terribly awry." I do not know exactly how the PS 29 playground fire started, but I can imagine. And I believe it was an accident. And, I have to say, I'm relieved it was an accident and not an act of malicious intent.

I woke up this morning with a vivid recollection of a particular instance when I was a teenager. I was 15, a sophomore at Dobson High School in Mesa, Arizona. I lived in one of the neighborhoods built by Charles Keating. Every house had a swimming pool. There were elm and eucalyptus in the front yards and decorative citrus in the back. Our subdivision wrapped around a golf course, and the winding maze of streets inside Keating Circle kept commuters from trying to cut through our neighborhood if traffic was bad on the grid.

President Obama chose Dobson High School as the venue at which he gave a speech shortly after being elected.

In early autumn, I went with a group of friends to a football game at Red Mountain, a high school that then stood at the very edge of the sprawl, although now it's pretty centrally located. The boy who I went with sat too close to me and explained that a team had to advance ten yards to get a first down, and that they had four chances before they had to turn the ball over to the other team. I have five brothers and a dad who used to argue with the television during football season, but being a teenage girl I didn't tell that boy that he didn't have to explain the rules to me.

Mesa had a habit of building schools in Soviet-style blocs, with an elementary and junior high and high school all inhabiting a single campus, and this must have been the case at Red Mountain, because when it became pretty clear our team was losing, we wandered over to the playground and teeter tottered and spinned on the merry-go-round and just hung around, out from under the watchful eyes of any adults. Kids smoked and flicked their cigarette butts into the sand where during the day little kids would be playing. One of the girls in our group of friends had Aquanet hairspray in her purse, and one of the boys sprayed and lit it so it made an impressive burst of flame that was both nerve wracking and exhilarating. Nothing caught fire. We didn't attract any attention. There were no consequences, and I don't think we would have understood the potential for consequences in any case.

The boy who painstakingly explained football to me spent the next summer in Yale's young leaders program. One of the girls went on to Smith College. Another of the girls was an exchange student in Belgium and now runs an ad agency in Hong Kong. We were good kids, on student government and speech and debate. We've become, more or less, productive adults. But we did things that were utterly irresponsible, sometimes antisocial, and for which there could have been serious consequences.

My friend who grew up in Farmingdale, Long Island confirmed that as a teenager she too was witness to the age-old teenage party trick of lighting something sprayed from an aerosol can. In her case, it was Lysol. She went on to Hampshire College and a career in finance.

Back to the present, living in our bucolic neighborhood seems to me to be about as close to living in a suburb as you'll get in some ways. And like suburban teens, I have to imagine that sometimes on a Saturday, after a party, these city teens would seek out a place to hang around without an adult audience. Maybe they (God forbid) smoke. Obviously they were playing with fire. And perhaps (this is speculation, of course), in an instant that turned from good fun to sheer terror, their aerosol flame thrower got out of hand.

I think it is right and appropriate that the teens parents' are paying for the replacement of the playground equipment. I hope that they do not face criminal charges. But if the teens remain anonymous, I think they'll learn the wrong lesson and the neighborhood will continue to feel unsettled and angry.

I told my second grader that teenagers don't comprehend consequences for themselves and that is what sets them apart from adults. But part of learning to comprehend consequences for oneself is facing the unintended consequences of one's actions. The teens who set the playground on fire may not have intended to destroy something much beloved by the under seven set. But they did. And they made a lot of small children -- their neighbors and perhaps the siblings of their friends -- extremely unhappy. Second graders have a well-developed sense of justice. They want the perps caught. Part of facing the consqences of their actions in this case should involve coming forward and making an apology.

In my imagination, these teens would stand on the stage in the auditorium, in front of all of P.S. 29's students. They would have prepared remarks acknowledging their responsibility and they would apologize. They might be overwhelmed by emotion and brush tears from their downcast faces. And then they would do community service. And everyone would be so impressed with their courage and maturity. And maybe a grump would think they got off too easy, but I don't think apologizing is ever easy. We'd get the new playground and everyone would move on. Then the teens would get on with their lives. In a year or two they'll be in college or traveling. In 20 years they might have a child of their own.

The alternative is that they remain kind of anonymous (apparently lots of people already know who they are, so they aren't really exactly anonymous), get a free pass from their parents, the neighborhood continues to feel robbed of closure, and they learn the lesson that their parents can buy them out of trouble. Or, after the fire marshall finishes investigating, the teens still face criminal charges. That would suck.

They should apologize and get it over with.