Youth gone wild

The bright and shining future of the free world will one day be led by the present teenage race. These strange and hormone-driven beasts we see polluting the local malls and pounding their chests in school have always been a mess of nature. Just looking at their freakishly unproportioned growth deformities and faces like sausage supreme pizza leads to drawn conclusions, both correct and incorrect, about the generation of the doomed. I have witnessed these walking tragedies firsthand in the hallway and within every other square inch of these grimey walls, being that this is my last year in the public hellhole known as high school. Teenagers have long been seen as dimwitted hell-raisers on a quest for sex, drugs and the unknown, but within the modern age, a newfound lust for stupidity seems to have been cemented in us. Never mind the American dream being achieved through hard work and ethics, this brutish nightmare of society is now founded on fear, bigotry, machoness and ignorance.

It seems to me that when teenagers are dealt with the decision of making something of themselves, they strive for the easiest way out. Rather than enduring the beating of schooling and aiming for a college degree, they say “fuck it”—the common motto of this generation written across their foreheads in black sharpie ink. My slacking class of monsters prefers a life of hard liquor and an abundance of smokable drugs. And who can blame them? It’s much easier to be stupid in a time of mass confusion. A lifetime spent drunk is far more enjoyable than a life of a working stiff. It seems to be easier to throw a football and lift weights than it is to read a book. However, this lack of any sort of work ethic is crippling us.

Is it any wonder why the old man shakes his fist in anger as teens piss on everything they suffered through to make the world what it is today? This leaves the rest of the population pointing fingers in every direction to find a culprit for us savage teens. But who is to blame for such treason? Hollywood? That scar-faced bastard Tony Montana? Lil Wayne?

The list could go on forever, but these are trying times for teenagers. With hairy palms comes great responsibility, and that responsibility is often too much to bear. We are in still aging pieces of walking flesh. We’re raised on fun and bred in free public schools. With almost no discipline at all, it’s no wonder we roam the streets without concern of danger. The only spankings we’ve endured were detentions—or time-outs—and half-hearted apologies that mean absolutely nothing. Then when we are done being babied like spoiled brats, we are handed a hammer instead of a rattle and are told to “work,” weaning us of the breast when we know nothing of independence.

Lost faith

Luckily for the world, thousands of miles beneath the Earth’s crust, there are kids who get this bizarre situation and actually give a shit. They care about political issues other than the legalization of marijuana. They are able to balance out the sex and nicotine-hungry, greased underbelly of American teens with the demands of a working class society. Contraire to adult fundamentals, it is possible to do. When there is a higher concern for duties rather than excess, if we rest our raging hormones for a good 30 minutes and pick up a damned book, then the world would be peaches and cream.

But the damage is being dealt as we have lost the respect of the previous generations, and education funds are being slashed left and right due to a lack of faith. That means there will be fewer history books for us to use as a pillow substitute and smear our nasal waste onto, more broken desks with unreadable cave drawings commonly called graffiti from a distant time, crappier school slop to gulp down as our eyes begin to water, and worst of all, a dying breed of teachers who are willing to work for peanuts to mold the pancake batter minds of the youth.

My anger comes from the 68-year-old man in my heart, but when stories linger the halls of how the party last night was epic because a gun was wielded in front of a boy’s face for dancing with the wrong woman, or how they got so wasted that they’re amazed they drove home in one piece, it is this that burns my nostrils and questions the faith Obama has in us, the youth. Maybe I’ve only seen the rats that roam the sewer instead of the people outside of the sewer. But this thought of hope of the other side deludes me when I see unreadable gibberish on the walls that the locals claim to be art. Or you walk in the bathroom and see that someone wrote “fuck the sytem,” spelling system wrong. How can anyone possibly fight the system with stupidity? By sticking it to the man by dropping out and not even being a part of a system?

I walk through the hallways and see the school function posters defiled with prehistoric scribbles that spell out some useless term. I squint my eyes against the tobacco and marijuana smoke from the boys’ restroom. I see the tossed cans of countless energy drinks piled in all corners and fresh vegetables the government paid for with our taxes slopped on the ground, as an elite group of shitheads play hacky sack with one of the bags of carrots from the cafeteria. As I watch the beasts at play, I see the janitor and his mop, mopping the scum and piss from the bathroom after someone so cleverly decided to take a fresh dump on top of all the toilet paper in the bathroom that is clogging the toilet. As I watch, I feel like the janitor. I see the messes being made. I shake my fist and clean it up, but no matter how much I clean, the rat bastards will make the mess over and over again.