Read the following articles from Unit 5, jotting down your first impressions of each article to use in the reflections. * Sleeping with Guns by Bruce Holbert * My Daughter Smokes by Alice Walker * A Drunken Ride, A Tragic Aftermath by Theresa Conroy and Christine M. Johnson * Young and Isolated by Jennifer M. Silva

Sleeping With Guns
By BRUCE HOLBERT
THE summer before my sophomore year in high school, I moved into my father’s house. My father had remarried and the only unoccupied bedroom in his house was the gun room. Against one wall was a gun case he had built in high school, and beside it were two empty refrigerators stocked with rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. My bed’s headboard resided against the other wall and, above it, a resigned-looking, marble-eyed, five-point mule deer’s head with a fedora on its antler rack.
The room had no windows, so the smell of gun oil filled my senses at least eight hours each day. It clung to my clothes like smoke, and like a smoker’s cigarettes, it became my smell. No one in my high school noticed. We all smelled like something: motorheads of motor oil, farm kids of wheat chaff and cow dung, athletes like footballs and grass, dopers like the other kind of grass.
It did not appear to anyone — including me — that residing within my family’s weapons cache might affect my life. Together, my three brothers own at least a dozen weapons and have yet to harm anyone with them. Despite their guns (or, arguably, because of them), they are quite peaceable. As for me, I have three guns, one inherited and two gifts, and I’m hardly a zealot. In fact I never had much interest in guns. Yet it is I who killed a man.
It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat. The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.
My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for the phone.
The house sat beside one edge of a river valley and I knew that between the orchard at the opposite side and the next town was 20 miles of rock and pine. I was a cross-country champion in high school. I could run through the woods and find my way to my cousins, who lived far into the mountains. I could easily disappear. But I remained where I was, mindful that even if I ran, I would escape nothing. So, when the sirens finally whirred and the colored lights tumbled over the yard and the doors of the cruisers opened and a police sergeant asked who was responsible, I raised my hand and patted my chest and was arrested.
Though the charges against me were eventually dropped, I have since been given diagnoses of a range of maladies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and adult attention deficit disorders. The pharmacists fill the appropriate prescriptions, which temporarily salve my conscience, but serve neither my story nor the truth.
Where I grew up, masculinity involved schooling a mean dog to guard your truck or skipping the ignition spark to fire the points, and, of course, handling guns of all kinds. I was barely proficient in any of these areas. I understood what was expected of me and responded as best I could, but did so with distance that would, I hoped, keep me from being a total fraud in my own eyes.
Like many other young men, I mythologized guns and the ideas of manhood associated with them.
The gun lobby likes to say guns don’t kill people, people do. And they’re right, of course. I killed my friend; no one else did; no mechanism did. But this oversimplifies matters (as does the gun control advocates’ position that eliminating weapons will end violent crime).
My friend was killed by a man who misunderstood guns, who imagined that comfort with — and affection for — guns was a vital component of manhood. I did not recognize a gun for what it was: a machine constructed for a purpose, one in which I had no real interest. I treated a tool as an essential part of my identity, and the result is a dead man and a grieving family and a survivor numbed by guilt whose story lacks anything resembling a proper ending.
Bruce Holbert is the author of the novel “Lonesome Animals.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 28, 2013, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Drunken Ride, A Tragic Aftermath
By Theresa Conroy and Christine M. Johnson
When Tyson Baxter awoke from that drunken, tragic night - with a bloodied head, broken arm and battered face - he knew that he had killed his friends.
"I knew everyone had died," Baxter, 18, recalled. "I knew it before anybody told me. Somehow, I knew."
Baxter was talking about the night of Friday, Sept. 13, the night he and seven friends piled into his Chevrolet Blazer after a beer-drinking party. On Street Road in Upper Southampton, he lost control, rear-ended a car and smashed into two telephone poles. The Blazer's cab top shattered and the truck spun several times, ejecting all but one passenger.
Four young men were killed.
Tests would show that Baxter and the four youths who died were legally intoxicated.
Baxter says he thinks about his dead friends on many sleepless nights at the Abraxas I Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center near Pittsburgh, where he was sentenced to be held Dec. 20 after being found delinquent on charges of vehicular homicide.
"I drove them where they wanted to go, and I was responsible for their lives," Baxter said recently from the center, where he is undergoing psychological treatment. "I had the keys in my hand, and I blew it."
The story of Sept. 13 is a story about the kind of horrors that drinking and driving is spawning among high school students almost everywhere . . . about parents who lost their children in a flash and have filled the emptiness with hatred . . . about a youth whose life is burdened with grief and guilt because he happened to be behind the wheel.
It is a story that the Baxter family and the dead boys' parents agreed to tell in the hope that it would inspire high school students to remain sober during this week of graduation festivities - a week that customarily includes a ritual night of drunkenness.
It is a story of the times.
*
The evening of Sept. 13 began in high spirits as Baxter, behind the wheel of his gold Blazer, picked up seven high school chums for a drinking party for William Tennent High School students and graduates at the home of a classmate. Using false identification, according to police, the boys purchased one six pack of beer each from a Warminster Township bar.
The unchaperoned party, attended by about 50 teenagers, ended about 10:30 p.m. when someone knocked over and broke a glass china cabinet. Baxter and his friends decided to head for a fast-food restaurant. As Baxter turned onto Street Road, he was trailed by a line of cars carrying other party-goers.
Baxter recalled that several passengers were swaying and rocking the high- suspension vehicle. Police were unable to determine the vehicle's exact speed, but, based on the accounts of witnesses, they estimated it at 55 m.p.h. - 10 m.p.h. over the limit.
"I thought I was in control," Baxter said. "I wasn't driving like a nut; I was just . . . driving. There was a bunch of noise, just a bunch of noise. The truck was really bouncing.
"I remember passing two (cars). That's the last I remember. I remember a big flash, and that's it."
Killed in that flash were:
Morris "Marty" Freedenberg, 16, who landed near a telephone pole about 30 feet from the truck, his face ripped from his skull; Robert Schweiss, 18, a Bucks County Community College student, whose internal organs were crushed when he hit the pavement about 30 feet from the truck; Brian Ball, 17, who landed near Schweiss, his 6-7 frame stretched three inches when his spine was severed, and Christopher Avram, 17, a pre-med student at Temple University, who landed near the curb about 10 feet from the truck.
Michael Serratore, 18, was thrown 15 feet from the truck and landed on the lawn of the CHI Institute with his right leg shattered. Baxter, who sailed about 10 feet after crashing through the windshield of the Blazer, lost consciousness after hitting the street near the center lane. About five yards away, Paul Gee Jr., 18, lapsed into a coma from severe head injuries.
John Gahan, 17, the only passenger left in the Blazer, suffered a broken ankle.
Brett Walker, 17, one of several Tennent students who saw the carnage after the accident, would recall later in a speech to fellow students: "I ran over (to the scene). These were the kids I would go out with every weekend.
"My one friend (Freedenberg), I couldn't even tell it was him except for his eyes. He had real big, blue eyes. He was torn apart so bad. . . ."
Francis Schweiss was waiting up for his son, Robert, when he received a telephone call from his daughter, Lisa. She was already at Warminster General Hospital.
"She said Robbie and his friends were in a bad accident and Robbie was not here" at the hospital, Schweiss said. "I got in my car with my wife; we went to the scene of the accident."
There, police officers told Francis and Frances Schweiss that several boys had been killed and that the bodies, as well as survivors, had been taken to Warminster General Hospital.
"My head was frying by then," Francis Schweiss said. "I can't even describe it. I almost knew the worst was to be. I felt like I was living a nightmare. I thought, 'I'll wake up. This just can't be.' "
In the emergency room, Francis Schweiss recalled, nurses and doctors were scrambling to aid the injured and identify the dead - a difficult task because some bodies were disfigured and because all the boys had been carrying fake drivers' licenses.
A police officer from Upper Southampton was trying to question friends of the dead and injured - many of whom were sobbing and screaming - in an attempt to match clothing with identities.
When the phone rang in the Freedenberg home, Robert Sr. and his wife, Bobbi, had just gone upstairs to bed; their son Robert Jr. was downstairs watching a movie on television.
Bobbi Freedenberg and her son picked up the reciever at the same time. It was from Warminster General . . . there had been a bad accident . . . the family should get to the hospital quickly.
Outside the morgue about 20 minutes later, a deputy county coroner told Rob Jr., 22, that his brother was dead and severely disfigured; Rob decided to spare his parents additional grief by identifying the body himself.
Freedenberg was led into a cinderblock room containing large drawers resembling filing cabinets. In one of the drawers was his brother, Marty, identifiable only by his new high-top sneakers.
"It was kind of like being taken through a nightmare," Rob Jr. said. ''That's something I think about every night before I go to sleep. That's hell. . . . That whole night is what hell is all about for me."
As was his custom, Morris Ball started calling the parents of his son's friends after Brian missed his 11 p.m curfew.
The first call was to the Baxters' house, where the Baxters' 16-year-old daughter, Amber, told him about the accident.
At the hospital, Morris Ball demanded that doctors and nurses take him to his son. The hospital staff had been unable to identify Brian - until Ball told them that his son wore size-14 shoes.
Brian Ball was in the morgue. Lower left drawer.
"He was 6-7, but after the accident he measured 6-10, because of what happened to him," Ball said. "He had a severed spinal cord at the neck. His buttocks was practically ripped off, but he was laying down and we couldn't see that. He was peaceful and asleep.
"He was my son and my baby. I just can't believe it sometimes. I still can't believe it. I still wait for him to come home."
Lynne Pancoast had just finished watching the 11 p.m. news and was curled up in her bed dozing with a book in her lap when the doorbell rang. She assumed that one of her sons had forgotten his key, and she went downstairs to let him in.
A police light was flashing through the window and reflecting against her living room wall; Pancoast thought that there must be a fire in the neighborhood and that the police were evacuating homes.
Instead, police officers told her there had been a serious accident involving her son, Christopher Avram, and that she should go to the emergency room at Warminster General.
At the hospital she was taken to an empty room and told that her son was dead.
Patricia Baxter was asleep when a Warminster police officer came to the house and informed her that her son had been in an accident.
At the hospital, she could not immediately recognize her own son lying on a bed in the emergency room. His brown eyes were swollen shut, and his straight brown hair was matted with blood that had poured from a deep gash in his forehead.
While she was staring at his battered face, a police officer rushed into the room and pushed her onto the floor - protection against the hysterical father of a dead youth who was racing through the halls, proclaiming that he had a gun and shouting, "Where is she? I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill his mother."
The man, who did not have a gun, was subdued by a Warminster police officer and was not charged.
Amid the commotion, Robert Baxter, a Lower Southampton highway patrol officer, arrived at the hospital and found his wife and son.
"When he came into the room, he kept going like this," Patricia Baxter said, holding up four fingers. At first, she said, she did not understand that her husband was signaling that four boys had been killed in the accident.
After Tyson regained consciousness, his father told him about the deaths.
"All I can remember is just tensing up and just saying something," Tyson Baxter said. "I can remember me saying, 'I know.'
"I can remember going nuts."
In the days after the accident, as the dead were buried in services that Tyson Baxter was barred by the parents of the victims from attending, Baxter's parents waited for him to react to the tragedy and release his grief.
"In the hospital he was nonresponsive," Patricia Baxter said. "He was home for a month, and he was nonresponsive.
"We never used to do this, but we would be upstairs and listen to see if Ty responded" when his friends came to visit, she said. "But the boy would be silent. That's the grief that I felt. The other kids showed a reaction. My son didn't."
Baxter said, however, that he felt grief from the first, that he would cry in the quiet darkness of his hospital room and, later, alone in the darkness of his bedroom. During the day, he said, he blocked his emotions.
"It was just at night. I thought about it all the time. It's still like that."
At his parents' urging, Baxter returned to school Sept. 30.
"I don't remember a thing," he said of his return. "I just remember walking around. I didn't say anything to anybody. It didn't really sink in."
Lynne Pancoast, the mother of Chris Avram, thought it was wrong for Baxter to be in school, and wrong that her other son, Joel, a junior at William Tennent, had to walk through the school halls and pass the boy who "killed his brother."
Morris Ball said he was appalled that Baxter "went to a football game while my son laid buried in a grave."
Some William Tennent students said they were uncertain about how they should treat Baxter. Several said they went out of their way to treat him normally, others said they tried to avoid him, and others declined to be interviewed on the subject.
The tragedy unified the senior class, according to school principal Kenneth Kastle. He said that after the accident, many students who were friends of the victims joined the school's Students Against Driving Drunk chapter.
Matthew Weintraub, 17, a basketball player who witnessed the bloody accident scene, wrote to President Reagan and detailed the grief among the student body. He said, however, that he experienced a catharsis after reading the letter at a student assembly and, as a result, did not mail it.
"And after we got over the initial shock of the news, we felt as though we owed somebody something," Weintraub wrote. "It could have been us and maybe we could have stopped it, and now it's too late. . . .
"We took these impressions with us as we then visited our friends who had been lucky enough to live. One of them was responsible for the accident; he was the driver. He would forever hold the deaths of four young men on his conscience. Compared to our own feelings of guilt, (we) could not begin to fathom this boy's emotions. He looked as if he had a heavy weight upon his head and it would remain there forever."
About three weeks after the accident, Sen. H. Craig Lewis (D., Bucks) launched a series of public forums to formulate bills targeting underage drinking. Proposals developed through the meetings include outlawing alcohol ads on radio and television, requiring police to notify parents of underage drinkers and creating a tamper-proof driver's license.
The parents of players on William Tennent's 1985-86 boys basketball team, which lost Ball and Baxter because of the accident, formed the Caring Parents of William Tennent High School Students to help dissuade students from drinking.
Several William Tennent students, interviewed on the condition that their names not be published, said that, because of the accident, they would not drive after drinking during senior week, which will be held in Wildwood, N.J., after graduation June 13.
But they scoffed at the suggestion that they curtail their drinking during the celebrations.
"We just walk (after driving to Wildwood)," said one youth. "Stagger is more like it."
"What else are we going to do, go out roller skating?" an 18-year-old student asked.
"You telling us we're not going to drink?" one boy asked. "We're going to drink very heavily. I want to come home retarded. That's senior week. I'm going to drink every day. Everybody's going to drink every day."
Tyson Baxter sat at the front table of the Bucks County courtroom Dec. 20, his arm in a sling, his head lowered and his eyes dry. He faced 20 counts of vehicular homicide, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of driving under the influence of alcohol.
Patricia Ball said she told the closed hearing that "it was Tyson Baxter who killed our sons. They used the car as a weapon. We know they killed our children as if it was a gun. They killed our son."
"I really could have felt justice (was served) if Tyson Baxter was the only one who died in that car," she said in an interview, "because he didn't take care of our boys."
Police officers testified before Bucks County President Judge Isaac S. Garb that tests revealed that the blood-alcohol levels of Baxter and the four dead boys were above the 0.10 percent limit used in Pennsylvania to establish intoxication.
Baxter's blood-alcohol level was 0.14 percent; Ball's 0.19 percent; Schweiss' 0.11 percent; Avram's 0.12 percent, and Freedenberg's 0.38. Baxter's level indicated that he had had eight or nine drinks - enough to cause abnormal bodily functions such as exaggerated gestures and to impair his mental faculties, according to the police report.
After the case was presented, Garb invited family members of the dead teens to speak.
In a nine-page statement, Bobbi Freedenberg urged Garb to render a decision that would "punish, rehabilitate and deter others from this act."
The parents asked Garb to give Baxter the maximum sentence, to prohibit himfrom graduating and to incarcerate him before Christmas Day. (Although he will not attend formal ceremonies, Baxter will receive a diploma from William Tennent this week.)
After hearing from the parents, Garb called Baxter to the stand.
"I just said that all I could say was, 'I'm sorry; I know I'm totally responsible for what happened,' " Baxter recalled." It wasn't long, but it was to the point."
Garb found Baxter delinquent and sentenced him to a stay at Abraxas Rehabilitation Center - for an unspecified period beginning Dec. 23 - and community service upon his return. Baxter's driver's license was suspended by the judge for an unspecified period, and he was placed under Garb's jurisdiction until age 21.
Baxter is one of 52 Pennsylvania youths found responsible for fatal drunken-driving accidents in the state in 1985.
Reflecting on the hearing, Morris Ball said there was no legal punishment that would have satisfied his longings.
"They can't bring my son back," he said, "and they can't kill Tyson Baxter."
Grief has forged friendships among the dead boys' parents, each of whom blames Tyson Baxter for their son's death. Every month they meet at each others' homes, but they seldom talk about the accident.
Several have joined support groups to help them deal with their losses. Some said they feel comfortable only with other parents whose children are dead.
Bobbi Freedenberg said her attitude had worsened with the passage of time. ''It seems like it just gets harder," she said. "It seems to get worse."
Freedenberg, Schweiss, and Pancoast said they talk publicly about their sons' deaths in hopes that the experience will help deter other teenagers from drunken driving.
Schweiss speaks each month to the Warminster Youth Aid Panel - a group of teenagers who, through drug use, alcohol abuse or minor offenses, have run afoul of the law.
"When I talk to the teens, I bring a picture of Robbie and pass it along to everyone," Schweiss said, wiping the tears from his cheeks. "I say, 'He was with us last year.' I get emotional and I cry. . . .
"But I know that my son helps me. I firmly believe that every time I speak, he's right on my shoulder."
When Pancoast speaks to a group of area high school students, she drapes her son's football jersey over the podium, and displays his graduation picture.
"Every time I speak to a group, I make them go through the whole thing vicariously," Pancoast said. "It's helpful to get out and talk to kids. It sort of helps keep Chris alive . . . when you talk, you don't think."
At Abraxas, Baxter attended high school classes until Friday. He is one of three youths there who supervise fellow residents who keep track of residents' whereabouts, attendance at programs and adherence to the center's rules and regulations.
Established in Pittsburgh in 1973, the Abraxas Foundation provides an alternative to imprisonment for offenders between 16 and 25 years old whose drug and alcohol use has led them to commit crimes.
Licensed and partially subsidized by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the program includes work experience, high school education and pre- vocational training. Counselors conduct individual therapy sessions, and the residents engage in peer-group confrontational therapy sessions.
Baxter said his personality had changed from an "egotistical, arrogant" teenager to someone who is "mellow" and mature.
"I don't have quite the chip on my shoulder. I don't really have a right to be cocky anymore," he said.
Baxter said not a day went by that he didn't remember his dead friends.
"I don't get sad. I just get thinking about them," he said. "Pictures pop into my mind. A tree or something reminds me of the time . . . sometimes I laugh. . . . Then I go to my room and re-evaluate it like a nut," he said.
Baxter said his deepest longing was to stand beside the graves of his four friends.
More than anything, Baxter said, he wants to say goodbye.
"I just feel it's something I have to do . . . just to talk," Baxter said, averting his eyes to hide welling tears. "Deep down I think I'll be hit with it when I see the graves. I know they're gone, but they're not gone."

Young and Isolated
By JENNIFER M. SILVA

In a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Mass., in early 2009, I sat across the table from Diana, then 24, in the kitchen of her mother’s house. Diana had planned to graduate from college, marry, buy a home in the suburbs and have kids, a dog and a cat by the time she was 30. But she had recently dropped out of a nearby private university after two years of study and with nearly $80,000 in student loans. Now she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.
“With college,” she explained, “I would have had to wait five years to get a degree, and once I get that, who knows if I will be working and if I would find something I wanted to do. I don’t want to be a cop or anything. I don’t know what to do with it. My manager says some people are born to make coffee, and I guess I was born to make coffee.”
Young working-class men and women like Diana are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks. Today, only 20 percent of men and women between 18 and 29 are married. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.
For more affluent young adults, this may look a lot like freedom. But for the hundred-some working-class 20- and 30-somethings I interviewed between 2008 and 2010 in Lowell and Richmond, Va., at gas stations, fast-food chains, community colleges and temp agencies, the view is very different.
Lowell and Richmond embody many of the structural forces, like deindustrialization and declining blue-collar jobs, that frame working-class young people’s attempts to come of age in America today. The economic hardships of these men and women, both white and black, have been well documented. But often overlooked are what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in 1972 called their “hidden injuries” — the difficult-to-measure social costs borne by working-class youths as they struggle to forge stable and meaningful adult lives.
These are people bouncing from one temporary job to the next; dropping out of college because they can’t figure out financial aid forms or fulfill their major requirements; relying on credit cards for medical emergencies; and avoiding romantic commitments because they can take care of only themselves. Increasingly disconnected from institutions of work, family and community, they grow up by learning that counting on others will only hurt them in the end. Adulthood is not simply being delayed but dramatically reimagined along lines of trust, dignity and connection and obligation to others.
Take Jay, for example. He was expelled from college for failing several classes after his mother suffered a severe mental breakdown. He worked for a year, then went before the college administration and petitioned to be reinstated. He described it as a humiliating experience: “It’s their jobs to hear all these sob stories, you know, I understand that, but they just had this attitude, like you know what I mean, ‘Oh, your mom had a breakdown and you couldn’t turn to anyone?’ ”
Jay got back in and graduated (after a total of seven years of college). But when I talked to him, he was still working food-service and coffee-shop jobs at 28, baffled about how to turn his communications major into a professional job. He felt as if he was sold fake goods: “The world is at my fingertips, you can rule the world, be whatever you want, all this stuff. When I was 15, 16, I would not have envisioned the life I am living now. Whatever I imagined, I figured I would wear a suit every day, that I would own things. I don’t own anything.”
I heard many people express feeling betrayed by the major institutions in their lives, whether colleges, the health care system, employers or the government.
Christopher, who was 25, stated simply, “Well, I have this problem of being tricked.” He explained: “Like, I will get a phone call that says, you won a free supply of magazines. And they will start coming to my house. Then all of a sudden I am getting calls from bill collectors for the subscriptions to Maxim and ESPN. It’s a runaround: I can’t figure out who to call. Now I don’t even pick up the phone, like I almost didn’t pick up when you called me.” He described isolation as the only safe path; by depending on no one, Christopher protected himself from trickery and betrayal.
These fears seep into the romantic sphere, where commitment becomes yet another risky venture. Kelly, a 28-year-old line cook, spent 10 years battling depression and living off and on in her car. She finally had a job and an apartment of her own. But now she was worried about risking that hard-earned sense of security by letting someone else into her life. “I like the idea of being with someone,” she said, “but I have a hard time imagining trusting anybody with all of my personal stuff.” She said she would “rather be alone and fierce than be in a relationship and be milquetoast.”
“I know where all my shortcomings come from. From the things that I either did not do, or I did and I just happened to fail.”
Men often face a different challenge: the impossibility of living up to the male provider role. Brandon, who worked the night shift at a clothing store, described what he thought it would be like to be in a relationship with him: “No woman wants to sit on the couch all the time and watch TV and eat at Burger King. I can only take care of myself.”
It is not that these men and women don’t value family. Douglas, then 25, talked about loss: “Trust is gone. The way people used to love is gone.” Rather, the insecurities and uncertainties of their daily lives have rendered commitment a luxury they can’t afford.
But these young men and women don’t want your pity — and they don’t expect a handout. They are quick to blame themselves for the milestones they have not achieved. Julian, an Army vet from Richmond who was unemployed, divorced and living with his mother at 28, dismissed the notion that his lack of success was anyone’s fault but his own: “At the end of the day looking in the mirror, I know where all my shortcomings come from. From the things that I either did not do or I did and I just happened to fail at them.” Kelly echoed that: “No one else is going to fix me but me.”
This self-sufficiency, while highly prized in our culture, has a dark side: it leaves little empathy to spare for those who cannot survive on their own.
Wanda, a young woman with big dreams of going to college, expressed virulent anger toward her parents, a tow-truck driver and a secretary, for not being able to pay her tuition: “I feel like it’s their fault that they don’t have nothing.” Rather than build connections with those who struggled alongside her, Wanda severed relationships and willed herself not to be “weak-minded” like her parents: “if my mentality were different, then most definitely I would just be stuck like them.”
Working-class youths come to believe that if they have to make it on their own, then everyone else should, too. Powerless to achieve external markers of adulthood like marriage or a steady job, they instead measure their progress by cutting ties, turning inward and numbing themselves emotionally.
We don’t want to go back to the 1950s, when economic stability and social solidarity came at the cost of exclusion for many Americans. But nor can we afford the social costs of going forward on our present path of isolation. The social and economic decline of the American working class will only be exacerbated as its youngest members make a virtue out of self-blame, distrust and disconnection. In order to tell a different kind of coming-of-age story, we need to provide these young men and women with the skills and support to navigate the road to adulthood. Our future depends on it.

Jennifer M. Silva is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of the forthcoming book “Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.”

(1) Essay 5 Directions
The theme for this unit is social issues, including smoking, gun control, drunk driving, and social isolation. In this final essay, choose two of the issues that you feel the closest personal connection to and write an essay that uses exemplification, or comparison/contrast, or cause and effect as outlined below.
Pick two from the four articles and do an essay base either on exemplification, comparison/contrast, or cause and effect. * Exemplification--summarize both articles and identify your personal connection in your introduction; then share what you thought the most effective examples were that each author used in the essays along with your explanation of why you chose those examples and any relevant personal experiences or observations in the body of your essay. Look for places to include your classmates' comments on the same topics. Conclude your essay with a personal reflection on the social issues themselves. * Comparison/Contrast--summarize both articles and identify your personal connection in your introduction; then use comparison/contrast to analyze the writing style of each author in the body of your essay, focusing on how each author introduced the topic, provided information, and concluded the article. Look for places to include your classmates' reflections on the same topics. In your conclusion, offer your personal reflections on the social issues themselves. * Cause and Effect--summarize both articles and identify your personal connection in your introduction; then focus on why you think the authors used the kinds of information and the writing style they chose to get their point across. Look for places to include your classmates' comments on the same topics. Conclude your essay with a personal reflection on the social issues themselves.
Use at least five parenthetical references (a mix of quotes and paraphrases) in addition to the summaries you provide in your introduction. More information on summaries and paraphrases and a practice exercise is included below. The quotes, paraphrases, and summaries can be used in the introduction, the body, or the conclusion of your essay.
Your essay will need to be between 750-1000 words.

Essay Checklist * Topic: example, comparison contrast, or cause and effect essay on two articles with relevant personal connections * Word Count: 750-1000 words * Mechanics: at least five quotes/paraphrases used correctly with parenthesis notes, and a short summary of each article. * Proofreading: be sure to do it!