USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011207.0958 (On Screen): I think there's hope for the future. At least some young people in this country are not buying the stupidity of their parents. I've mentioned Jord before; he's one of the contributers to WankerCounty and though he's a pretty typical teenager, obsessed with girls and video games and music and his friends and girls, he's also creative and deep-down sensible. He's been the victim of adult stupidity more than once. For instance, he went downtown and started taking pictures of a building there -- and was roughly questioned by a security guard who suspected he might be a terrorist. And now "zero-tolerance" has struck him; his art collage was suppressed at school because it contained pictures of a couple of men with guns. I might mention that about the most violent that Jord gets is when he and a buddy went to visit the keeper of another blog and soaked him with squirtguns. (Alas, the photos from that expedition are no longer online, lost in their upgrade.)

Jord rejects the idea that he and his fellows are stupid imitators of whatever they see around them, and he's right. A kid who is raised well and taught well will not confuse the movies for reality, and those who really are deeply disturbed (such as the murderers at Columbine) are likely to explode even without such exposure. Jord understands what the parents in his community (and, seemingly all around the US) don't: everyone has to take responsibility for their own actions. The cult of the victim is morally bankrupt

Another thing that gives me hope (thanks, Iain): the high school student body in a town in New Hampshire voted on the "class sweethearts" for their yearbook and overwhelmingly chose a lesbian couple. The school principal overrode that result, but the superintendent reversed that and the choice will stand. Evidently the students in that school have not inherited the anti-gay baggage of many in my generation. And that is as it should be. Each generation should harvest the best it can from the one which comes before, but leave the worst behind. I was, for instance, deeply heartened the first time I saw a mixed group of black and white teenagers hanging around together in the Boston area. They didn't seem to think this was remarkable; but I knew just how unusual it was. Boston was where school-busing first caused riots; if it's not where the term "neighborhood schools" first became a euphemism for apartheid then it is surely where it became established that way. And yet the kids ignored it, and discovered that kids with different skin colors are fun to hang out with.

I want to see more people that age telling people my age that we're full of shit, and start ignoring what we have to say -- because we are full of shit about many things. We have a great deal to teach which is valuable, but we also have a great deal to teach which belongs on the compost heap. And they have to decide which is which, because we naturally think it's all valuable (or we wouldn't be trying to pass it on), even though we're wrong. Primary among those things which should be compost is the idea that teenagers have to be protected from evil influences because they're too stupid or naive to recognize evil when they see it. The right solution, as Jord points out, is to teach them before that to recognize and resist evil so they can protect themselves. (discuss)