As the middle class collapses, the next generation inhabits a world where money means little and dreams are few

As the government’s economic support for the middle class evaporates, an under covered story is how this affects the dreams of the children in the next generation.  Why would teenagers who have seen their parents’ economic foundation ripped away and their pensions along with it, strive to replicate their elders’ dreams? Why would you buy into a society that seems not to be buying in to the idea of your future?

This is the worldview I found when I spent two weeks in New Orleans among the Gutter Punks, the tattooed and pierced train hopping youth that hang out in the French Quarter.  Like many who have seen these kids on the streets of my hometown, I was initially put off by the way they looked, dismissing them as the children of poverty or drug addicts. When my daughter dropped out of college and joined them, I came to see them differently.

The kids were part of a growing 21st Century subculture that never has been properly described, and for good reason. Their tattoos and piercing, ragged clothes, and rude ways are calculated to shock and repel. Many dismiss them as the children of poverty or defiant rebels from the world of privilege.   I spent two weeks among them in New Orleans at the close of January and I have come to see them differently.  They are at once a world unto themselves, a society, a culture, and, most importantly, a reaction to and result of the decline of the middle class.

Despite their squalor, Gutter Punks believe they are privileged, prescient and smarter than the rest of us, which is why they work so hard to keep this life secret.  They have built surprisingly cheerful community around a dystopian worldview. They tend to cluster in America’s ruined industrial landscape, in cities like Buffalo and Detroit, but particularly New Orleans with its 30,000 abandoned houses.  One woman in a squat I visited described how she and her friend had gone house hunting, visiting fifteen abandoned houses before they found one that suited their tastes, and picked up furniture from the streets around them.  They pride themselves on earning and spending very little. She pointed to three dollars that she said had been sitting on the crate next to her mattress for three days. To get their essentials, they roam in packs like feral animals over the rutted Katrina flood plain, scavenging shelter, food from dumpsters and raw materials in a neighborhood crisscrossed by freeways and train tracks. “When it all goes to shit in five or six years,” one said, “the only creatures that will be able to survive are cockroaches and the Gutter Punks.”

I propose to write a story that uses the lives of the kids who died in the fire and their families as a way of portraying how this subculture struggles to build a life on its own terms in the ruined industrial world, among the abandoned houses, the wrecked economy and the tatters of their parents dreams.