Young People

Eric Bogosian calls his new play subUrbia, and the young people loitering outside the onstage 7-Eleven at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre are about as sub- as you can get - subliterate, submarginal, subemployed and sometimes close to subhuman. But not subtle. Definitely not subtle. There's Tim, who learned his bigotry in the Air Force and his vicious, indiscriminate rage God-knows-where. There's Buff, the would-be videomaker with the pea brain and the raging libido. There's Sooze, the community-college artiste who wants to run off to New York with her performance piece, Burger Manifesto.

Down a dirt path to an edge of Olympia Lakes, Daniel Braun waded Thursday with his dog, Roxy, into water that reached almost knee-high. "This is a hangout, kind of, especially in the summertime . . . when you don't feel like going to the beach," Braun, 23, said. But the night before, the Burlington County lake where Braun happily splashed had taken the life of a 19-year-old man. The victim was among four young people who drowned in recent days - three on Wednesday - in unguarded natural waters in the Philadelphia area.

From Frankford Avenue to Market Street, from Cottman Avenue to Porter Street, the story was the same. Supermarkets, drugstores and five and dimes were breaking the law by selling cigarettes to minors. At least that's what a group of teenagers found in a survey, released last month by the Tobacco-free Education & Action Coalition for Health - TEACH for short. When the teens entered a selection of stores in Philadelphia to buy cigarettes, they found that 70 percent of the merchants made the sales - even though the sale of tobacco product to minors is supposed to be prohibited.

Some members of Philadelphia City Council got a different perspective yesterday on the youth violence that has gripped the city. They heard about the problem directly from street-smart youths and young adults. About 50 youths, most of them from a program called Don't Fall Down in the Hood that helps to rehabilitate young people 13 to 18 who have been in the juvenile justice system, were guests of Council's Public Safety Committee. About a dozen of them gave testimony. The hearing was scheduled by Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, who said the goal was to "include the youths' experiences and views in developing plans, actions and policy" to reduce violence.

You've heard all the names. Slackers. Twentysomethings. Generation X. Call them what you will, when the young people at the Presidents' Summit for America's Future finally got a chance to speak yesterday, they said you can call them something else: ignored. "We hear a lot of people saying that we're America's future but we're also America's now, America's today," 16-year-old Izetta Mobley said, to the hoots and hollers of a standing-room-only crowd in Ballroom D of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel.

LAST weekend, thousands of people poured into Center City to enjoy the first warm weather after a harsh winter. Many were young people. A few hundred - maybe 1,000 - got out of control on South Street. The teenagers gathered using social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. By spreading the word online, the kids were able to gather a big crowd. For a brief time, these teens fought in the streets, a few bystanders were beaten up, and several shops were vandalized.

Are today's young people a self-absorbed, listless bunch, too jaded to care, their brains pickled by massive doses to MTV? Popular media feed that image; many adults have bought the stereotype. So it's time to check out "Youth Voices," a nationwide scientific survey of 1,200 Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, recently released by the Washington-based Center for Policy Alternatives and Who Cares, a quarterly journal on service and action themes for young Americans. "This generation is underrated, misunderstood and misnamed," says Who Cares editor Heather McLeod.

They will lead us through much of the next century, yet all too often, Ellen Harley says, today's young people are defined as part of the problem - drugs, violence, crime, teen pregnancy - rather than the solution. Yesterday, Harley, director of the Project for Regional Cooperation, convened a gathering at Widener University that sought to present a different view. "Our public policy views youth as juvenile delinquents, or at best as the citizens of the future," she told the 35 young people and 55 adults who gathered for the three-hour get-together.

Overwhelmingly, young people acknowledge that character, honesty and trust are important and that their own ethics pass the test. However, they also acknowledge that they have lied, cheated and stolen in the last 12 months. And 1998 survey results released today suggest that the lying and stealing and cheating are becoming more prevalent. "The hole in our moral ozone is getting bigger," says Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. "In terms of honesty and integrity, things are going from very bad to worse.

An after-school program here teaching abstinence in hopes of reducing teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases is becoming more popular, its organizers say, but finding volunteers to help is difficult. Abstinence Can Empower began in August 1998 with 15 children ages 9 to 14, but now 35 to 40 attend daily, mostly from the Norristown area, said director and instructor Gilbert M. Kinsey Jr. He said about 27 boys and 31 girls are enrolled for sessions at the George Washington Carver Center.