Summer and Youth: The More Things Change . . .

The Class of 2000 rises at midday, phones to ears before its dreams are entirely done. “Wha’s up?” “Mmmmm. Ummmm. I dunno. Wha’s up with you?” “Mmm. Umm. I dunno. So . . . wha’s up?”

Well, who isn’t dazed and confused on a Monday? Still, it’s believed that no teenager in history has yet established wha’s up in August before noon. So having given it their best shot, the kids who only a few years ago were held up as the kids of the future stumble to the fridge to stare wordlessly at its white-lit contents until the need for more sleep overwhelms them. At which point they stumble back into their rooms.

Is it the future, or is it just August that makes them so sleepy? Hours will pass before the Class of 2000 will emerge from dreamland again. When they do, they will look like 25-year-old jet-setters, and their eyes will be hidden by designer sunglasses that appear to have actually come from the future. “Wha’s up?” you’ll hear them chirp into the receiver. And then, over their shoulders: “We’re going to the beach. Outta here.”

And off they’ll go, to Zuma or Manhattan or Huntington or Newport, cocoa-buttered carloads of Jennifers and Jessicas and Javiers and Brents and Deshons. Off to whatever patch of hot sand the kids who know wha’s up are going to this August. Off into another Southern California summer, which, even here in the future, is the same as it ever was.

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Convention has it that we should mourn for children; childhood, it is said, ain’t what it used to be. A whole genre of thought has congealed around the idea that kids now are not only different but possibly evil. So evil, as the comedian Mike Myers would say, that you have to pronounce it “eeee-vell” to do the word justice. Woodstock rioting, Littleton, “The Blair Witch Project”--so goes the three-fer, which, in news-ese, always equals a trend.

And if the kids of the future are hell-bound, the summer of the future is alleged to already be there. Here the three-fer is year-round schools, plus the boom in summer day camps, plus working moms. Plus the current heat wave in the East, which to Easterners means that summer has, of course, died the world over. (Question: How come a drought in the Hamptons must be about global warming, but a drought in L.A. always signals the death of the California Dream?)

Much worry and many newspaper sales have been milked from these connect-the-dots theories. But in the real world, where news comes and goes, childhood and summer seem, frankly, more sleepy than dead. Particularly here in Southern California, where, for most folks, it has been hard this year to look into the sunglasses of a teenager without marveling: Same as it ever was.

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Maybe even better. For instance: In the nation, and (as usual) more so in Southern California, high school violence has plummeted. At last count, two out of three kids in the U.S. hadn’t gotten into any fights during the school year, 85% hadn’t gotten into any fights on campus and 91.5% hadn’t carried any weapons to school. Mike Males, the author of “Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation,” reports that among California’s white teens--one measure of suburban behavior-- per-person rates of gun deaths have dropped 25% since the 1970s, with even bigger declines in suicides (30%), criminal arrests (50%) and overdose deaths (80%).

In Los Angeles County, among all kids, only 0.06% of students were caught with weapons during the 1997-98 school year. The level was about a third of what it was at the start of the decade. Battery fell, too, by 30%. But statistics aside, there is also daily life here, which people tend to mistrust in the face of scary “trends.”

The other day, for instance, I went down to Huntington Beach. It was jammed with bikinied girls and wetsuited boys who could have been from 1969. “Nothing changes,” laughed Debbie Loftus, a middle-aged mother who grew up in Southern California and raised two kids here. “Maybe the water used to be a little cleaner, but see?” She gestured toward the whoosh of the waves and the fishy air and the squawk of sea gulls, circling. “Same pier. Same kids. Same crowds.”

Farther up Beach Boulevard, kids jostled, laughing, into Knott’s Berry Farm. Still farther inland, three sleepy-eyed boys skateboarded past a strip of nail salons and beanbag chair stores, their hair bleached identically blond. If we’re so wicked, they seemed to ask, why are we so eternal? Why do we make you close your eyes and remember the thrill of summers long gone? Are we not you, only younger? Is Youth not as enviable to Age as it ever was?

Past the palms and the stucco they flew in a burst of unbound laughter. “Wha’s up?” one called. And then they were gone.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].