At the time of Finnegan's writing, he was a high school honor student already investigating scholarships to the University of Washington. Juan's story is interesting, but what is apparently his own individual pathology does not necessarily contribute to Finnegan's theory of a harsh new social order. Finnegan's final subject, white sixteen year-old Mindy, plays nearly as unconvincingly as Juan as an example of a helpless young person caught in a pitiless caste system. Mindy lives in a distant suburb of Los Angeles called the Antelope Valley. It is a new development inhabited, as Finnegan learns, by blacks and Latinos who have moved out of the inner city and are eagerly working toward breaking into the middle class, and by whites who feel they are losing out economically and do not experience the privileges enjoyed by other whites.
Most families have two working parents or only one parent who is a working mother.
The commute to LA from the Valley is over two hours long, so adults are absent from the suburb from seven in the morning until at least seven at night. This combination of racial differences and lack of adult supervision has nurtured a bumper crop of young white racist skinheads. He believes Mindy and her peers are reacting to their perceived lack of opportunity by indulging in white supremacism and other nihilist teen pursuits. However, as any recent graduate of a suburban public high school can confirm, the raves, skinheads, tattoos, and straight-edgedness that shock Finnegan are all banal features of white suburban teenage life. Mindy's story must have seemed most upsetting to Finnegan not because teenage boys' desire to wear steel-toed boots and beat people up is visceral evidence of a Cold New World , but because Mindy herself is the most fragile and hurt of all Finnegan's subjects.