Boys will be boys - the latest teen sport is head-butting down your neighborhood's fences

Running Into Fences – by LAWRENCE DOWNES /NY Times

If a barreling teenager knocks over a wooden fence in Deer Park, and nobody is there to capture it for YouTube, is he still an idiot?

Well, yeah, say the homeowners whose property and late-night peace of mind have been violated by “fence plowing.” It’s the latest jackass fad to swirl through the cul-de-sacs of Deer Park, Babylon, Huntington and other expressway communities on Long Island. Young men are running headlong into fences for kicks that are greatly amplified when the cellphone video is posted on the Web. The police, parents, lawyers and authors of child-rearing books are on high alert.

Except for the video wrinkle, fence-plowing looks like just another eruption in a long history of teenage senselessness.

Is it as certifiably incomprehensible as it appears?

Maybe not, if you look more closely at the likely teenager in question. He is a pale guy this time of year, either gangly or dumpy, a jittery assemblage of adolescent muscle fibers and brain cells that will all someday assemble into an adult, but haven’t yet. Sophomoric by definition, this youth is plugged into his id but not his conscience, and the stabilizing fluid of common sense is still slipping and sliding through his system like unset Jell-O.

He ambles through his life, from Froot Loops to algebra to gym to homework, instructed at every point to keep his head down and to fit in. His rapidly growing brain might soon sizzle with promise, but for now it is unenchanted by school and unchallenged by its wintry habitat of houses and lawns and big-box stores. It lacks the accumulated clutter of experience that furnishes a calm and focused inner life.

It hungers for stimulation, which it usually finds in a succession of flickering images — from televisions, computers, video games, movies, cellphone screens, the scenes passing dully by his car window. For him a weekend night, no different from the ones before and the ones to come, centers on an endless stream of movies whose heroes do even stupider things than he does.

Looking out from this low plateau, his horizons look cramped. He seeks to widen them somehow, by doing something else, something tactile, nonanesthetic, something to get adrenaline moving in his numbed veins.

Then one night, out riding with his friends, he sees it: a fence. A plain wooden fence. It just sits there, an affront to his simmering agitation.

He puts his head down and runs. He may hear the satisfying skreeek of posts and slats giving way, then feel the ecstasy of free fall and a ratifying eruption of giggles. Or he may feel the concrete-reinforced thud and ringing in the skull that tell him he has chosen poorly.

Either way, he is out of breath. He is young and alive and in the company of friends. Is his behavior antisocial? Yes. It is also destructive, heedless of property rights, thoughtless, even criminal.

But impossible to understand? Live as these boys live, see what they see, negotiate life with the inadequate little tool kits they have assembled, and we still might want to call them idiots. Or we might not be so quick to dismiss our sons that way.