Blurred vision

Kelly Davis

Blurred Vision
So though I may be of a young age, I feel that I have come to a fair and reasonable conclusion. Teenagers are extremely stupid. I am myself a teenager of sixteen years old. My friends are teenagers, their boyfriends and girlfriends are teenagers, and they all do stupid stuff.
A few people that I know and am close are known to many as “bookworms”, “nerds” or “un-cool” . Yet to me they are just about the “coolest” people I know. “Cool” that word is ever changing and in my opinion growing farther and farther away from the truth. When the word first became used as a social status it meant not nearly what it means today, however the concept was the same. Some people are cool and others are not. I have tried many times, for my own purposes, to define the word, and yet I have come up short. The key aspects that I have come up with are, surprisingly, not the characteristics that I wish to attain. Yet still, a part of me, and of every person my age, wants to be cool. We all want to be socially acceptable and to fit in with the crowd. My question is: What ever happened to “dare to be different.”? What’s wrong with not being “cool”. Am I really supposed to think that drinking, doing drugs, being with boys, and countless other irrational acts are going to get me very far in the future? Often times I look at my parents as examples and it occurs to me how little of their life was spent in school and as teenagers. In the moment what happens on a day to day basis is all there seems to be and all there seems to ever be. Our brains are wired in a way that restricts us from seeing the future. We truly do live in the moment.
This brings me to my dads favorite saying “everything in moderation”, and how true that is. No matter what others say there can be too much of a good thing. To an extent living in the moment is powerful and deep, yet at other times, or when used in excess, it, on the contrary, sucks the meaning out of the moment. Do teenagers seriously not see the consequences of there actions? I mean I am fully aware of the concept, for it has been drilled in to my head for years and years, and still I see people making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. It scares me to think that some day my generation is going to be in charge of the government, the economy, and everything else that powers the world. What is going to happen if we are still not able to plan for the future? What about global warming? Resource failure? Poverty? How am I to expect that over the course of a few decades the entire way that we function will take a sharp right turn and suddenly be able to think globally or even just outside themselves? The lack of respect for others and even for ourselves is preposterous.
It makes me so angry to be lumped in with people, children, who don’t even know right from wrong. Do they not listen to their parents? Am I the only one who doesn’t find being bad fun? What ever happened to good clean fun? Why does everything I try to do with friends have to take a turn for the worse? The hardest thing I have had to do so far in my life was, and is, to stand up for my values and literally “just say no”. I am lucky because I was blessed with a stubborn soul and I do not easily give in to things that I know are wrong. However there are a few that are very close to me that do not possess the same characteristic. I feel as though I am in dire need to protect them and essentially save them from themselves. What will this world come to if we keep traveling on the path we are on?