A year later...

Seeing the caption "Kurt Cobain: 1967-1994," flash up on the screen last year was eerie. I was born in '67 too, and could not help but feel my own mortality when he died. And I loved Nirvana. There was something about Cobain's songs that made them both new and familiar at the same time. It was punk, but with some of the anger replaced with world-weariness and cynicism.

It struck a chord with me as part of an American generation that grew up with broken homes, needle-strewn beaches, concrete jungle-gyms, and no reason to hope for anything better. The music spoke of psychological wounds left untreated. Wounds caused by societal napalm: those ill-considered, far-reaching social changes that had been thrown at us, indiscriminately, in the seventies. From what little I know of his background, Cobain's scars must have run deeper than most.

But Cobain is just one of many thousands of confused young American men who I could have mourned in 1994. Some killed themselves directly, using a gun, or indirectly, with drugs and alcohol. Some died in street-fights, or in car accidents. But what almost half of them had in common was that -- one way or another -- they killed themselves. Cobain was just another victim of a society that sees young men as expendable. His talent only postponed his sacrifice.

Dying by numbers

From the latest US National Centre for Health Statistics (NCHS) data and a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) study published in 1993, it seems that almost 18 percent of all men aged 15 to 34 who died in 1990 either committed suicide or were killed in a drug-related incident. Including the deaths of drunk drivers from figures provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatal Accident Reporting System (NHTSA FARS), that number goes up to 25 percent: one in four. Add in those lives ended by homicide (NCHS) and 42 percent of young men can be said to have been killed through self-destructive activity.

But is hasn't always been like that. Though figures that go back more than 15 years are scarce, statistics seem to back up an argument for a generational increase in self-destructive deaths. In 1970, suicide, drug-abuse, drinking and driving, and violence only caused 35 percent of young men's deaths. This despite a 30-percent drop in motor-vehicle accident fatalities caused by changes in the law: lower speed limits, higher drinking ages, and more stringent car safety requirements.

From 1970 to 1990, the proportion of men killing themselves -- directly or indirectly -- went up by seven percent. In real terms, an extra five thousand men lost their lives. That's more men than died in Vietnam in 1970.

But why should American men born in the sixties and seventies be self-destructing like this. Psychologist Dr Valerie Klinge studied suicide incidence within the Atascedero State Hospital in California from 1979 to the early 90s. Atascedero is a 1000 bed forensic psychiatric hospital housing criminals who are mentally disturbed. "70 to 80 percent of our patients are here because their crimes have occurred with the use of drugs," she says, "and I consider using drugs to be a very self-destructive behaviour. That number has been going up steadily since I've been here." Despite increasing awareness of suicide and rigorous programs to prevent it from happening, the overall suicide rate did not fall through the '80s.

Most of the hospital's suicides, she says, are in their thirties or younger.

According to Klinge, some of the risk factors for self-destructive behaviours, including suicide, are, "Belonging to a low socio-economic group, coming from broken families, not finishing school, not having any strong religious affiliations, not having decent employment, or any kind of employment." Of these, she says, one of the biggest changes since the 70s is in family life. "The family unit just doesn't exist as we knew it 25 years ago, especially in urban areas. The patients here in the hospital don't have a family to return to... even the young ones, the 18 to 19-year-olds."

Family values

Though not at risk herself Michelle, 25, suffers from the reality of these statistics. She works as a receptionist in Seattle and has strong ties to the music scene there. She has had several friends die, friends who she never expected to get into trouble. Now, she says, she is much more cautious about who she gets close to. She doesn't want to risk making attachments with people who she might lose later on.

One friend died in a drug-related car wreck. "I always used to think that he was so stable," she says, "that he wasn't the kind of person who would commit suicide or anything like that. But that's what he basically did: he basically killed himself by getting behind the wheel when he was all messed up."

Michelle says she, too, sees a link between generation and self-destructiveness. Her friends who died, she says, were often the children of baby-boomers who married young and were more interested in their own lives than their children's. She says she can now identify the type. "They think they're the only ones who care about themselves at all..."

An example was her friend David (not his real name). "David was beautiful. He was sweet: he always smiled. He had gorgeous long brown hair anybody would kill for. He warmed up instantly to anybody, he didn't care who they were. He could find something good in everybody. I never knew his brother, but I knew that David thought he was basically the protector of his brother... David helped raise him, helped do a lot of the substitute fathering, since he was about six or seven years old. His brother died in a car wreck accidentally. We knew he [David] was taking it hard but we thought that everything was fine... until he killed himself not more than a mile from where we lived." David threw himself off the same cliff his brother's car had gone over.

That was just six months ago. Michelle says that, since then, she spends a lot more time worrying about her friends and acquaintances. "I sometimes feel like I have to take on the position of mother almost because I feel like I'm the only one that is looking ahead more than just tomorrow morning... I am looking at the fact that if you really spend all your money on weed then you're not going to be able to pay your rent. If you really stick that needle in your arm, you might not wake up. I think a lot of my friends feel they're invincible or, when they don't feel invincible, they don't care enough [about themselves]."

Death and the male

Neil Howe is an economist and historian based in Virginia. Co-author with Bill Strauss of "Generations" and "13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?", Howe says there are good reasons why young men today might be more cavalier with their own safety. "A carelessness of death is probably what it means to be more risk-prone... It's also the notion that you either make it big or you're nothing... and if you're nothing you might as well be nothing, you might as well be dead. There's no compensation for losing in life."

"That's also reinforced by both the reality and the perception of how you get ahead in today's economy: the whole notion of a lottery economy, where in any position there are a few superstars and everyone else just gets paid dirt," he says. To illustrate this, Howe points to sports. As a professional athlete, he says, you're either a Michael Jordan or a nobody: famous, making millions, or living precariously. "That, combined with the fact that average wages and the average standard of living for young people have suffered so much, increases the mood of fatalism, desperation."

But this economic bad news doesn't explain why, within the generation, men and women's experience of death has been dramatically different. Where young men, for instance, are committing suicide much more frequently now than in 1970, young women are actually killing themselves less often. Howe says that this points to family break-up as an important contributor to self-destructive behaviour. More than 50 percent of marriages in the US now end in divorce.

"It's long been a theory, and supposedly an observation among people who deal with the fall out and consequences of divorce, that it affects boys more than girls... because children stay with the mother and so the boy is the one without the role model," says Howe. "That doesn't mean that girls are not also affected by divorce. But if you look at all the external or objective indicators -- testing, academic performance, violence, crime, psychological problems, medical problems -- you seem to get a bigger impact on boys than girls. That, to me, is sort of an interesting connection, because obviously this generation is one that has been very much affected, some would say traumatised, by divorce."

Personally, I see many other possible reasons why men have less hope today than they did twenty years ago. For instance, men's role in the family and in society has been continuously eroded so that it is now defined negatively. Men, especially in politically correct America, only know what they're not supposed to be like: there are few positive role models. Also, some branches of the feminist movement (and I say this as a feminist) have translated their hostility to a male-dominated society into a hatred of men. Though still paid less than men, women have reason to be optimistic about their lot. Life is getting better for us. Men, on the other hand, have little to look forward to.

Smashing icons

Last year, David Fricke, music editor for Rolling Stone, described Cobain as the "John Lennon of his generation." This trite comparison may have had some truth to it, at least in the US. But the world got to see Lennon grow up, clean up, and dry up before he died, leaving kids who were old enough to know who he was. Cobain was just 27. His daughter was a year old: only a baby. When she grows up, her visions of her father will come from MTV, not from real memories.

The pain I still feel about Kurt Cobain's suicide is an expression of my grief for all the men of my generation whose lives have been squandered. It an expression of my fear that one of my friends, even my brother, will wind up dead in an emergency room. And it is an expression of my sorrow for the next generation of children who will barely remember they ever had a father.

I don't know if there is anything we can do to stop this from happening. But I do know that, if there is a solution, it will come from my generation of Americans. No-one else seems to care.