A Tale of Two Teenagers

Gaten Matarazzo

When do teenagers become responsible for their actions? I mean not just a legal sense, where legislators can draw an arbitrary line at age eighteen or twenty-one, but morally, in their community’s eyes. Are 18-year-olds sufficiently mature to make reasonable, informed decisions about their futures? I know plenty of parents who’d insist otherwise. What about 16-year-olds? 14-year-olds?

I got into a brief argument this week online over exactly how culpable Gaten Matarazzo actually is for his planned practical joke show, Prank Encounters. It hasn’t even been one week since I wrote that Matarazzo’s show, which hasn’t broadcast yet, signalled capitalism's death knell. Though an initial Twitter outpouring held Matarazzo entirely responsible for this disaster, I and others noted a high-school sophomore couldn’t possibly have done this alone.

This story comes concurrently with news about Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland shooting survivor and conservative activist, whose acceptance to Harvard University was rescinded last week, following revelations that, aged sixteen, he’d used racist and anti-Semitic language in private communications with peers. Unable to explain his bad choices to Harvard’s satisfaction, he finds himself yanked from America’s most prestigious university. Conservatives nationwide have cried foul.

I cannot claim moral superiority over Kyle Kashuv. In these very pages, I’ve already admitted engaging in deliberately inflammatory behavior, some painfully close to what Kashuv’s admitted. And I did it for the same reasons Kashuv gives, because I thought doing so made me look “as extreme and shocking as possible.” And I was older than Kashuv when this happened, so I cannot even hide behind claims of childhood innocence.

So I’m forced to take certain arguments off the table immediately. I cannot hold Kashuv personally culpable for his behavior, however morally abhorrent I find it, without inviting punishment for my own actions. Sure, I could note that, being more than twice Kashuv’s age, I’ve had more time for personal penance. But if every kid must first shrive their teenage sins before getting into college, how few Americans would ever afford higher education?

But this only invites more cow paths of moral reasoning. As bad as Gaten Matarazzo’s classist behavior is, does it really exceed Kyle Kashuv’s racist behavior? Matarazzo couldn’t have created a show without backing from Netflix, which owns assets valued at $54 billion. But Kashuv’s activist career is bankrolled by Charlie Kirk’s group Turning Point USA, which gets money directly from Foster Freiss, the DeVos family, and the NRA.

Where do the frontiers of culpability lie? Netflix invested Matarazzo with executive producer authority over his show, so some adults certainly believe him mature enough to make informed decisions over productions costing millions of dollars. But what criteria did they use? That’s probably a murkily defined area. They probably got to know Matarazzo personally beforehand, and deemed him mature because their relationship seemed sufficiently adult.

Harvard’s admissions officers cannot possibly know Kashuv sufficiently to do likewise. They needed to judge him from his public pronouncements, which have been numerous, as demonstrated by the number of photos which show him on national news programs, at the White House, and behind podiums branded with right-wing organization logos. Harvard needed to judge Kashuv, not personally, but based on his public record.

Kyle Kashuv, right, with one of his biggest fans

Thankfully, nobody ever photographed me flashing the Nazi salute in public. I probably would’ve fumbled my way through justifications as tin-earred as what Kashuv offered: as I’ve written, I thought the message my actions conveyed was so absurd that observers would think I intended the exact opposite of what that sign actually meant. Re-reading that last sentence, I clearly see how stupid and indefensible that sounds.

In my defense, I also didn’t start college until age 25.

On the one hand, any sixteen-year-old should know that White people don’t get to drop N-bombs with impunity anymore. And any sixteen-year-old who’s flipped burgers for dating money would know work isn’t funny. On the other hand, I was sixteen, even seventeen, when I flashed the Nazi salute for cheap shock value, and thought I was hilarious, until a caring adult explained how I actually looked. Who makes that loaded call?

Too many parents must wrestle, daily, with finding the magic line where a teenager becomes responsible. Parents I know and respect find themselves stranded on this question. Living in the public eye, as Matarazzo and Kashuv do, possibly makes outsiders perceive teens as more responsible than they really are. But if they’re responsible for their poor choices, I’m responsible for mine. Am I ready to own my poor choices in public?