Just wrapped up a three-minute phone interview for Fox News (!) on the Haines murder. National attention continues to focus on this - the CrimeBlog thread, if anything, has heated up since the arrest was announced; indeed, I’d link, but CrimeBlog seems to be down, “has exceeded its CPU quota” - which also happened Saturday night, specifically as a result of interest in the Haines thread. 

Was interested, too, in this thread on LOL regarding the Era’s story about why there are so many teen killers here in Lancaster County. It quickly got into the usual thing - locals blaming the outsiders, outsiders pointing out that it’s mostly local kids doing the killing. I’ve sort of got this completely unscientific theory that it’s the combination - the intersection - of both.

As I’ve written, I graduated from Manheim Township High School in the mid-1980s, and literally every one of the kids I was good friends with then left Lancaster County. I did too, for a while; wound up back here when there happened to be a job here, and I was looking for a job. But for Manheim Township kids - and I suspect for kids at many other local high schools - Lancaster County is a good place to leave. You’re 18 and this place just seems too small, too constrained, too straight-laced. There’s more to life than what’s found in Lancaster County, kids think - and they’re right. Though “more” doesn’t always mean better.

Kids rebel; there’s more to rebel against here. The things that seem so alluring about New York or L.A. seem so far away - except they’re really not, they’re really at at your fingertips, the computer keyboard, and you don’t actually have to go there to immerse yourself in the pathologies that we imagine are somehow unique to the big city.

So you get maybe the worst of both worlds. Add to that the alienation produced by divorce, add to it the desensitization provided by video games, add to it the the degree to which the Internet allows confused kids to really create entirely new identities for themselves, to be someone they aren’t - and do things that in “real life” they’d never do - and it’s all a highly combustible mix, and it doesn’t take too much to set it off.

It might have been easier at a time when the broader world didn’t reach too far into Lancaster County, but given the ubiquity of the Internet and the growing number of channels on cable, that was bound to happen whether there was an actual influx of newcomers or not. And of course the newcomers, the economic activity generated by new home construction and all that necessarily goes along with it has been a major reason why this county has been so economically healthy for so long (and look at who makes the most money off all this - I guarantee you they’ve been here for generations). And that perpetuates itself; more people more here becuase the job market’s good, it’s so much less expensive than New York or wherever and it’s a great place to raise kids.

Except then it seems like maybe it’s not so great a place to raise kids anymore, at least not as much. And if there’s anything that stems the flow of newcomers, that perception may be it.