I have been thinking about my teenage years. Specifically, I've been trying to recollect the most horrible scene on TV when I was young, the most shockingly graphic footage available in pre-Internet days. All I came up with was a videotaped copy of "The Evil Dead" — a zombie gore-fest now considered quaint — watched with a band of homeboys amid uneasy giggles.

I was a so-called apathetic youth, a term I've never found useful. Much like adults, young people care about their sphere of concern and pursue with passion whatever matters. Back in high school, my sphere of concern covered playing the drums, my girlfriend and looking up punk-rock lyrics in the dictionary.

In each generation, the young are called apathetic when they're not curious about what adults think is important. But even inside my little shelter, I knew somewhere beyond was the vastness of the world, and at times I felt vaguely inadequate about being so disengaged. There seemed to be no intersection. I couldn't locate Syria on a map: I'd never been there and didn't know any Syrians.