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Very soon I will be leaving for the Promised Land, college, my future.
Though a little scared, the thought of living on my own and going to college,
where the BS work is greatly diminished, is exhilarating. For all you
students in your final year of high school, I, as always, have some advice.
First: Have fun, remember that life is not about a goal so much as a journey.
If you forget to admire the path on the way to the goal, you will miss out
on most of life. You are where I was a year ago, and it's a good place to be.
This is the last year of your high school experience. Do what you have to do
to make it through, but know that if you don't get into that school you want
to go to that the world will not end. Community college for a couple years
is a viable alternative. Also, remember to learn. High school has the
disadvantage of making learning so horrible that students start to hate it.
That is a shame. Knowledge is a wonderful thing to possess. Far too many
students I know became too wrapped up in the grades that they forgot to learn
the material for the sake of knowing it. They study, get the A and then drop
the information as if it were carcinogenic. What they forget is that
information is powerful. Oh, to know how the world works, to know how the
world was, to be able to see the connections between all things. Ignorance
may be bliss but knowledge is power.
High school! Why did you have to make learning so dull? The biggest
flaw in the high school way of teaching is the standardization of work,
grades, and tests. Standardization is a perverse idea. Everyone is different
and you cannot assume that people in the same class learn the same way, at
the same rate, or have an equal chance to succeed. I personally am quite good
at standardized tests, but I know many people who aren't. On the flip
side, I know people who have a high tolerance for repetitive, monotonous
work, while I do not. Believe me, nothing will lower your GPA quicker than a
refusal to do the pointless homework assigned to you in at least 2 out of 5
classes. It seems to me that if you can do something once, you should be able
to do it again. Also, in math classes the teachers ought to stop focusing
on the right answer and look at what the student does. If a student gets one
part of a proof wrong which causes all the rest of the proof to be wrong, if
his logic was valid, he ought to receive partial credit. The best teachers
I've ever had were the teachers that made learning fun and were kind and
amiable. Those are the teachers I learn best from. Then again, not
everyone enjoys learning the way I do.
School may seem a cruel institution, a prison to keep our youth off
the streets. It is not. Think of all the teachers who put up with rude
behavior and oppressive administrations seeking only the chance to implant
some knowledge in the mind of a student. Teachers have no choice in life.
They are teachers and they love to teach. Why else would they settle for
such low pay? So have fun this senior year, live your life, but don't forget
the teachers. The happiest moment of a teacher's life is when she sees that
she has made a difference, that she has planted a seed of knowledge in a
fertile mind.
To go off on a tangent, I hate commercials. I hate the idea of
advertisement. If a product is really useful or needed then advertisement is
not that necessary. While some of them are funny, most are full of lies, fake
computer simulations, and biased surveys. They use deceptive statistics and
entertaining scenarios as bait for the viewers' dulled eye. They use sex and
angst to sell products that have nothing to do with either sex or angst. They
take some of my favorite songs and use them to market their unworthy goods
(since when has laundry detergent been on the same level as Mozart). If the
government cared at all about economic honesty, it would make laws that
would force companies to be honest in advertisement. But then, of course,
they never will because then it would apply to their campaign ads. It's
amazing to think that Nike has actually tricked people into paying them for
the right to advertise their product. I saw a hat the other day, a normal
baseball cap, which had at least 8 visible swooshes on it. It made me more
than a little sick. It's not just Nike, it's almost all corporations. They
spread their propaganda like syphilis, making us blind and stupid. To get the
now-jaded audiences attention, commercials are getting more annoying every
day.
When did money be come the new god? When did people decide that
human Life has a monetary value? Some people kill others for their shoes, or
their car, other people are awarded ridiculously large sums of money from
companies that cause the death of their loved ones. I'm sorry if your son or
your spouse dies in a car crash but in my mind that does not make you
eligible for two million dollars. I'm sorry you tripped on the stairs and
that you are now paralyzed but I don't think that is necessarily the Stairs'
fault. Perhaps I'm insensitive but human misfortune happens. If you sue a
cigarette company because you have cancer, I have to wonder if perhaps the
coughing and the black mucus wasn't a warning enough. And you who fell down
those stairs, how many others fell down those same stairs? If the answer
is none then isn't it quite possible that you simply tripped, at no fault to
anyone. We all trip sometimes you know. Suing has become the new American
pastime. People are greedy. It's this same greed that compels certain
companies to pollute the water, to build cheap, and possibly unsafe, products
and to move into foreign countries where environmental and labor laws are
lax.
What do you get with your money? Where is the happiness you think
you can buy? The more you buy the more you want. Corporations have convinced
you that buying things you don't need will make you happy. But when you buy
that car, are you happy? If so, why do you then need to buy more stuff?
Aren't you happy? "But more things will make me even happier!" you
say. Do you honestly think that through material goods you can reach
peace? The more you have, the more you have to deal with things, the more
complex your life becomes and the less peaceful you will find yourself. Once
you have it all you will worry about is losing it. Read Siddhartha, by Herman
Hesse. Peace is not something you can find outside of yourself. Take a look
at the monk whose eyes show wisdom and peace and compare them to the
wealthy, crooked CEO's who squander wealth. If you think the monk is crazy,
ask yourselves if an insanity that makes you happy with things as they are
and allows you to live a meager life is such a bad thing. And if human nature
is to step on your brother's face to take his Twinkie, wonder if that is a
good thing. Money's only purpose is to allow us to be comfortable. Comfort,
however, is relative. You can learn to be comfortable with very little, but
the more you acquire, the harder it is to settle for less and the more fully
you become a tool of the men in power.
The only things you need to be happy, besides those that are
directly related to comfort, are all free. You can learn to fast, you can
learn to sleep outside in the woods, and you can learn to be entertained by
the moon and the birds. Your fast food, your condos, and your televisions are
no more than distraction from reality. Love and peace, unity and compassion,
these are the things that cost nothing and yet are worth more than any gem
or metal. These are the paths to happiness.
Nothing is what it should be anymore. The news is no longer
informative, advertisements no longer advertise, and entertainment no longer
entertains, merely pacifies. Actually, anymore was the wrong word. Things
have never been as they should. We are living in the age of creative
stagnation. It used to be that you needed talent and originality to make it
in music or art. Nowadays you need a gimmick. To make it in music all you
have to do is write something poppy, be attractive to the opposite gender, or
rehash something good. There are of course exceptions. Those exceptions will
be the classics of the future. How did we go from The Beatles and Jimi
Hendrix to Third Eye Blind and Matchbox 20 (aren't they actually the same
band). Lyrics have changed from the beautiful poetry of Bob Dylan and John
Lennon to the mindless ramblings of 25-year-old guitar players. Songs about a
girl liking you for you should never have been written. "Living is easy
with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It's getting hard to be
someone but it all works out, it doesn't matter much to me." If you
don't know what song that is from, ask your parents, you are missing out on
one of the most beautiful songs ever written. As is, a good beat has
eliminated the need for lyrics that have either poignancy or poetry.
Honesty is dead. In its place, our rulers have erected a machine
that spews propaganda from every orifice, blind to the harm it causes and
immune to any attacks. I speak of the media, the beast that ruins innocent
men's lives for the sake of a story and spreads consumerism like it the
plague it is. It tells us the things we have to know, like what Demi Moore is
wearing today and with whom Sharon Stone is sleeping. I wonder how many
people remember Kosovo exists, or that India and Pakistan still have nuclear
weapons aimed at each other. I wonder how many people know approximately how
many ICBs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) China had pointed at us at
all times, how many people realize that the US is at war in one form or
another everyday, and that nothing is sacred to out government, not the
independence of South American nations and not the privacy of its own
citizens. When the comics mentioned COINTELPRO, how many people got the joke,
if you can call it a joke. As long as the majority of the people in this
country are comfortable, awareness will remain dead. So for all you people
who are fine living in plastic houses with plastic lives, ignore me. Ignore
the flagrant human rights abuse that US corporations commit in foreign
countries, ignore the blatant oppression of minorities and women, ignore the
reality of things, for the real world is so much more upsetting to see. Oh,
the only problem with that is, until the majority of the people in the world
open their eyes, it won't get substantially better any time soon.
Sometimes I want to cry because things are getting so bad in the
world, and yes, I think its healthy for guys to cry. And for any guys who are
thinking about sending me mail calling me names for being a cry-baby, just
know that boys are 6 times more likely to kill themselves than girls and its
widely believed that emotional repression could be a large cause. So write
that letter but don't think I will care. After all, your letter isn't my
noose. In a world where people kill other people because of a difference of
faith, you have to wonder, are we any more civilized than the apes. As far as
I'm concerned, we are just a little more intelligent but no more
civilized.
I'd like to address the main topic of this site last of all. The
truth in youth we say. What is the truth? The only truth I can think of is
that we are people, individuals, and worthy of respect. As for stereotypes,
if an old lady who sees me on the street at night holds onto her bag a little
tighter, is that prejudice? Is it bad? I don't think so. There are a good
number of teenagers who are delinquent and while I am not one of them, I can
look pretty creepy and I can't hold old ladies accountable for being
cautious. Its only when people stat to talk down to teens, acting for some
reason as if we are stupid, not that some teens aren t, that I get angry. I
have met teens far more intelligent and aware than many grown-ups. Then
again, labeling and sorting is part of human nature, it is ingrained in
the working of the mind. I can't ask anyone not to attach labels to people
and not to place them into schemas, I can only ask that people be open minded
and adjust their schemas to reflect new information, instead of ignoring new
information just because it clashes with the pre-existing ideas. Believe it
or not, that is a big problem. So judge if you must but don't be afraid to
admit that you are wrong. Don't be afraid to be wrong. It is, after all,
unavoidable. This has an awful lot to do with self esteem, which is a main
focus in my essay Identity and Insecurity. Well, lets finish this long and
very poorly directed essay. This entire paper has been one long digression,
though it may appear more like random whining to the reader.
To those of you who made it this far, I have something to give you.
You may have read most of these already but probably not all of them. If
there are any books that you think I would like, please don't hesitate to
e-mail me with a list. Thank you for listening.
- The Razor's Edge by Sommmerset Maughm
- The
Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
- Notes From the Underground by Fyodor
Dostoevsky
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- 1984 by
George Orwell
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- Johnny Get
Your Gun by Dalton Trumbo
- The Grapes of Wrath by John
Steinbeck
- Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
- The Metamorphosis by Franz
Kafka
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- and
just about anything by Shakespeare
enjoy
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