Over the last few years I’ve created sort of a one person Stammtisch at a nearby fastfood place. It’s where I go to escape the computer. I sit (always at the same corner table), eat bad food, read, or just observe and listen.

This particular fastfood establishment is on a kind of urban fault zone, a street that is the dividing line between a booming barrio to the east and a booming yuppie gentrification area to the west, with an Interstate a block away and a huge Salvation Army shelter just down the street to add spice to the mix. Basically you’ve got your lowriders and you’ve got your SUV’s, plus the occasional homeless person who wanders in. Never the twain shall meet except of an evening in the eminently check-outable space visible from my corner perch.

You can learn a lot in such a place, just watching and listening.

Cliché confirmed: the children of poor families are (or certainly appear to be) better, more effectively loved than the children of affluent families.

Cliché confirmed: a significant percentage of the homeless really are mentally way off balance and would (and should) be in institutions if the Reaganites hadn’t slashed all kinds of funding in the 1980s.

Cliché shattered: the armies of teenagers doing hard shit work for minimum wage and doing it well (probably better than you or I could) in fastfood America give the lie to the TV/movie image of a younger generation going to pot, so to speak.

Cliché shattered (just last week—and what really caused this essay to take shape):

I sit at my Stammtisch, watching, cherishing my own guilty prejudices about the world and examining the hell out of my already over-examined life. The little incident I want to describe not only shattered a cliché it also shined a bright light on my own racist tendencies.

So I’m sitting there reading Stan Cutler, chortling away. It’s a surprisingly slow Saturday night. I hear the door open, look up, and in come four well-costumed homeboys: whitewall haircuts, giant shorts, gold chains, over-designed Nike’s. Uh-oh, I think. They’re talking loudly as they enter and I see the help behind the counter cringe.

They place their orders rather more boisterously than is necessary, get their numbers, and come sit a couple of tables away from me. Great. If there’s going to be a line of fire, I’m in it. At least I’m close enough that I can easily eavesdrop.

They sit… and start talking… computers. One of ‘em spent the day going crazy trying to edit his messed up Windows registry (what else is new?). Another sympathizes and offers what sound like reasonable suggestions (me, I would’ve just advised switching to Linux ASAP).

The computer talk goes on and on, switching from topic to topic in a natural flow: DSL vs. cable modem, best sites to buy a Nikon Coolpix digital camera, and so on.

I’m sitting there taking it all in, feeling suitably small and stupidly judgmental for having immediately pigeonholed them when they walked in.

Their food comes and the conversation drifts toward video and computer games. Aha, I think. Now we’re gonna get into some good old fashioned teenage Latinate violence, those genes that gave the world bullfighting are gonna come on strong.

Wrong. They’re all four of them bored silly with twitch shoot em up games. They spend a good five minutes bemoaning the lack of GOOD THINKING GAMES (!). One is an avid Links (the best golf simulation) player, another apparently spends hours every week playing bridge through Yahoo with partners all over the world.

Ever the good progressive, I sit, listen, slip on my ever-handy rose-colored spectacles and immediately see a happier future for us all.

Admittedly we’re dealing with a small, nay, teensy sample here (four out of how many million?). Of course such little statistical shortcomings never stop a determined progressive.

Anyway, this occurs to me: Given all we already know about the very powerful attraction that computer stuff and Internet stuff have for young males, ought not the wiser among us observers and social planners and would-be movers and shakes be hip to the high probability of a huge drop in youthful violence just about now?

I mean, these same guys walk in ten years ago and I guarantee they won’t be talking about file compatibility problems. They’d have been talking (pardon my language) pussy, dope, and wheels.

But now?

Is it sea change time, do you think? Is it possible that the powerful pull of the Internet etc. will seduce not only the 1600-on-SAT, almost all white nerd set, but EVERYBODY ELSE as well? Add in the unknown massive effects of universally available pornography, plus the egalitarian spread of "copyrighted" work, and there's a good chance we are truly in terra nova, a new world whose attractions to the young trample all over the destructive but comfortable fears of the old.