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Third spaces

There's a lot of online lament about the lack of third spaces for young people, which got me pondering...

The Baby Boomers threw parties. In the woods, at someone's house when the parents weren't home, whatever. Their third spaces were totally illegal. Teenagers aren't allowed to throw keggers. The cops started cracking down on that.

I'm GenX. Our third spaces were gas stations, convenience store parking lots, the mall sometimes, and when we got old enough, our cars. Cars were most of my third spaces as a youth. They had a radio and heat in the winter. Kids can't afford cars any more, and you're too vulnerable in one any way. They'd spend all their time getting fucked with by cops. There's a lot more cops now, with a lot more power, than there were when I was a kid. I used to deliberately seek out bad areas because I was basically a good kid and the cops in a rough town had enough to worry about they wouldn't waste effort fucking with someone who's just chasing beer which he intends to buy with the money he earned at his after school job.

So by overthinking I reframed the loss of third spaces. We never had third spaces, at least in America. Nobody catered to children and provided them with a third space, largely because kids are both broke and stupid. They can't pay much and the insurance is going to be high. So we took our own third spaces. For generations. We fought for them, and got arrested a lot over it. We took our third spaces however and wherever we could. That's, I think, what's missing. Even if the town, say, opened up the school gym at night as basketball courts or whatever, nobody would have gone. We didn't want that. We wanted a place outside of supervision where we made the rules, not some old person who doesn't understand what being a teenager is like. :)

I think it's better to take the surveillance boot off the youth throat and let them find their own third spaces than to pander to them and provide one for them. Any skateboarders out there? Are skate parks as good as guerrilla skating?

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I'm having a hard time responding to this.