heh teenagers

[SolidusRaccoon]

And yes i't the real real real me.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Good, for now, Until I get my clones

[RHJunior]

She does have a point, tho'. It's certainly not universal, but many parents have trouble dealing with the fact that their teenage child is no longer as emotionally dependent on her parents as she once was. A lot of their interactions with their child basically degenerate into "I want my kid to give me something that I can hassle her about, so that I can forcefully reassert our respective places in this relationship".

Teenagers aren't always the only ones with emotional issues to work out.

(And don't be so quick to dismiss teenage drama. I don't care if you're in your twenties, or forties, or your seventies, I guarantee you that there's stuff you get all worked up about that's just as petty and inconsequential as high school drama ever was, in the grand scheme of things - and being told that your problems don't matter rarely helps.

People never really outgrow juvenile angst; they just find increasingly subtle and abstract things to angst about.)

HALLELUJIAH.

SOMEONE got the damned point.

[Steltek]

I get the feeling that the rest of us just got served.

[StrangeWulf13]

Well, to be honest, you were all so quick to jump on the "make fun of the angsty goth teen" bandwagon when the arc started. But frankly, it's a cliche, and not the truth, so it had to be chased down and beaten with a stick.

btw, I think Ralph needs a new pair of running shoes... and a new stick.

[Celidah the Bardess]

She does have a point, tho'. It's certainly not universal, but many parents have trouble dealing with the fact that their teenage child is no longer as emotionally dependent on her parents as she once was. A lot of their interactions with their child basically degenerate into "I want my kid to give me something that I can hassle her about, so that I can forcefully reassert our respective places in this relationship".

Teenagers aren't always the only ones with emotional issues to work out.

(And don't be so quick to dismiss teenage drama. I don't care if you're in your twenties, or forties, or your seventies, I guarantee you that there's stuff you get all worked up about that's just as petty and inconsequential as high school drama ever was, in the grand scheme of things - and being told that your problems don't matter rarely helps.

People never really outgrow juvenile angst; they just find increasingly subtle and abstract things to angst about.)

HALLELUJIAH.

SOMEONE got the damned point.

One word: yes.

Without going into detail, I can say that I really understand Penny--and I'm less than a year from graduating from college, with an internship under my belt, too. Many parents have such a hard time letting go. Mine certainly do. Sure, Penny's solution is somewhat misguided and often funny, but haven't we all dealt with the same issues? (My sincere congratulations if you haven't. It's not fun.)

Once again, RH's taking a stereotype and tearing it down brick by brick. Boy, do I love this comic!

And oh freakin' yes, it is a universal fact that NO ONE is immune to angst. Or pettiness, or drama. But no one. I wouldn't be surpised to see musings on that concept very soon in this storyline.

You want angst? Pick a LJ, any LJ.

But-but-but...my LJ doesn't have much angst in it!

[SolidusRaccoon]

And oh freakin' yes, it is a universal fact that NO ONE is immune to angst. Or pettiness, or drama. But no one. I wouldn't be surpised to see musings on that concept very soon in this storyline.

Speak for yourself.

[Shyal_malkes]

now Ralph, what's the fun in getting to the point? it's a lot more fun walking blindly into it and getting poked in the shin

[Fusion]

You still get to it then, don't you?

[Shyal_malkes]

depends on if you're paying attention or not.

[Steltek]

It's not really so much the feelings, it's the response to them. Sure, everyone has/had that problem with their parents -- but retracting into this ridiculous "goth" lifestyle is not the right way to deal with it. Every kid indulges in angst, and plenty of adults, but not everyone makes their whole life about it.

[Narnian]

And yes i't the real real real me.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Good, for now, Until I get my clones

Don't you love farce?
My fault I fear,
I thought that you'd want what I want,
Sorry my dear
But where are the clones
Send in the clones
Don't bother, they're here

Apologies to Judy Colins

[RHJunior]

Gotta play devil's advocate here and ask: why, precisely, is it "this ridiculous lifestyle?"

I mean, relative to the "in" lifestyles of the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s?

Or relative to the "moody, angsty artistic" subset of those same decades?

Mind, I've only taken a poke around the Goth culture and it's odds and ends, and I do have to say it is justifiably a cause of concern. At the extreme ends, the nihilism, the dark symbolism that often dips into the occultic... the embracing of anything dark or disturbing or shocking.

But at the other end of the stick--- is it substantially different from all the other "teen movements?" Kids struggling with their darker emotions, floundering awkwardly as they try to express those new feelings and fears, a "shock the norms" attitude, trying to assert their own identity by repelling the status quo... every teenager goes through that struggle, and there's always been a few who go through it longer and deeper than most.

If the "goth" lifestyle--- which as far as I can determine can include anyone from the hardcore ink-drinking bastich who listens to nothing but Marilyn Manson, has tattoos on his eyelids and has so many piercings he looks like he was attacked with a rivet gun, to any girl who wears black lipstick and writes maudlin poetry, depending on who you ask--- is really a problem, then we're doing a really poor job of analyzing just HOW and WHY it's a problem.... and we're doing an even worse job of analyzing why they get INTO it in the first place. We either freak out and turn into martinets, or we laugh in their face and dismiss them.

Which is what is done with teenagers as a whole. They're going through a crucial time in their lives, where much of what they'll be as adults is being hammered out. And how do we, as a society, a culture, and a nation treat them?

We treat them as if we expect nothing of them.

We make it clear that we EXPECT them to be stupid, and violent, and antisocial. We dumb down their classes and grade their papers on lower and lower curves, and make it clear we expect them to be too stupid to handle anything more. We stuff their pockets full of condoms and tell them to their face that they're full of shit if they say they're chaste. We sophisticated elders back up and freeze up and scowl whenever they enter our personal space; we talk about the "drug problem" as if it were only people under eighteen who were sucking down hash or snorting up coke--- and as if there weren't a dozen adult boozehounds for every teenage party drinker.

When you stick a dogfood bowl under someone's nose, you make it clear that you expect them to act no better than the dog. And we have the outrageous arrogance to act offended <I>when they do just that.</i> And we laugh in their faces when they tell us they're better than that.

[Labrusca]

We treat them as if we expect nothing of them.

Look at how many kids ARE nothing. Nothing but some odd little creature or possession to be shuttled to day care, to be put with nannies, to be kept out of the way. How does a kid who is not only raised away from their parents so they have no one to really bond to, but is also lacking any permanent role model, supposed to feel? "You didn't care enough to be with me, so I must not be worth much!"
That fit what Penny said exactly! Though given how well Lily turned out, her parents must started out right, then dropped the ball with Penny.

Dr. Laura, the bain of the feminazis, put it neatly when she said she wished that the only women who were fertile were the ones who were going to have kids in a stable, two parent environment and were going to stay home and RAISE the kid themselves.

[SolidusRaccoon]

You make some good points Ralph.

[Fusion]

I have a christian/goth friend. I concider his choice apparal, well, odd; but he is sharp as a razer when it comes to some things. I respect him becouse he has been through a lot.

[Mutant for Hire]

Actually, I think the problem with teenagers is in part rooted in something fairly simple. The problems that teenagers face today didn't exist a century ago, or at most for a very small percentage of the adolescent population. The problem is that we've turned our adolescent population into a leisure class.

For thousands of years, when you hit adolescence, you were pretty much put on the bottom rung of adulthood. The term 'young adult' was no joke back then. If you were a hunter/gatherer, you were pretty much expected to pull your own weight as an adult. If you were a farmer in the lower classes, well, you were pretty much working on the family farm from childhood anyway, so you just kept on doing so. In the middle classes back then, by adolescence you were pretty much apprenticed to the trade that you were going to be doing for the rest of your life, and the upper classes were little different.

It was in the twentieth century that the adolescent daycare known as 'high school' came into existance. Adolescents stopped being expected to work for a living and instead were given lots of schoolwork, most of which had no practical use towards their future careers. It got even worse after WWII and a college degree became increasingly manditory. The value of a high school degree has dropped dramatically in the last half century to being nearly useless. Pretty much everything you are expected to know for a career you are expected to learn at college or on the job (having a college degree to prove you're capable enough to get a college degree).

Now apprenticeships had a lot of education to them, but at least people were learning things that were relevent to their jobs and they were pulling down a wage. Granted, apprentices tended to be badly underpaid, but at least they were earning income. In high school one is expected to work hard for that pat on the head known as a good grade. The situation is not unlike being in a Soviet factory, where if you work really hard you'll get a pat on the head and maybe even a medal, but your material situation doesn't improve a fraction.

We complain when students don't struggle hard for good grades. But how do good grades benefit them in their immediate circumstance? How do bad grades punish them in their immediate circumstance? People have rightly complained about the Soviet system where no matter how much or little you did you got the same so you might as well slack off, pointing out how Capitalism rewards hard work and punishes bad work (at least in theory). And we complain about adolescents, less mature than adults, being unmotivated about intangible things like grades, when no adult would be expected to put up with just getting brownie points for good behavior instead of a promotion, raise or even a year end bonus (of course some companies give none and wonder at the motivation of their workers).

Now there is a lot that young people need to learn and not all of it is fun and exciting or even to be rewarded. But one of the traditional things that parents tell their kids is 'the sooner you finish your chores, the sooner you can go out and play'. Does this apply in high school? Nope. With rare exception, you are stuck in high school for four years. It's like a prison term with no time off for good behavior. So why behave yourself if it doesn't make any difference? Why struggle through classes if in the end it makes almost no difference.

High school more or less is a minimum security prison with makework programs that in practical terms do little to prepare adolescents for life after high school. Let's be honest. The main job of high school is to keep these kids occupied until they're eighteen and give them some minimal preparation for college. And most of the classes aren't really all that relevent. Teaching Shakespeare to the bulk of kids isn't going to do them any good. The few who will be scholars in English literature are going to go over Shakespeare again in college anyway. Ditto for dissecting frogs in biology. Bio majors are likely to be going over everything anyway.

And given that parents support kids through adolescence, the kids are now a leisure class with nothing productive to do. It's not unlike high society circles, past and present. In those circles, people focused on fashion, entertainment and social/status games of various sorts because those were what leisure classes decoupled from a need to make their living spend their time on. Guess what adolescents in high school focus on? And people complain about them for doing that when really, there's nothing else for them to do. They have a lot of energy and potential and they're bored out of their skulls, and adolescents need guidance and approval.

Which brings me to the next point. In previous centuries, when you were apprenticed, you were under the thumb of and spent a fair chunk of your day under personal adult supervision. Now apprentices tended to be treated more poorly than well, but still they were under individual adult attention and authority. These days, adolescents are shuffled from classroom to classroom, and in each classroom they are merely one kid out of thirty odd students. How much individual attention and guidance do adolescents get from adults these days. The bulk of the time that adolescents spend their time with, and the group that they are by necessity forced to get approval from, is their own peer group of adolescents with immature values.

Right now society as a whole locks away teenagers in a daycare system where they are taught nothing useful, they are given no real incentive to behave like adults and instead are stuck with their own peer group where the only real tangible rewards are to gain the respect and approval of other adolescents, who themselves have immature values. And we complain when they don't work hard for the little gold stars and pats on the heads that we call grades for classes that are totally meaningless for the rest of their lives.

[SirBob]

When you stick a dogfood bowl under someone's nose, you make it clear that you expect them to act no better than the dog. And we have the outrageous arrogance to act offended <I>when they do just that.</i> And we laugh in their faces when they tell us they're better than that.

There's no complicated motive at work here. A lot of folks just find it easier to get a handle on their worldview if they can find somebody to blame for all the world's ills, divesting themselves of responsibility in the process. Teenagers are a convenient target, as they generally lack the social, financial, and legal wherewithal to defend themselves in any meaningful fashion.

[Deflare]

Once again, RH's taking a stereotype and tearing it down brick by brick. Boy, do I love this comic!

Apparently, the 'tearing down of stereotypes' thing doesn't apply to non-Christians and peace advocates.

This storyline has left me divided. On the one hand, I myself find Goths to be annoying- congratulations on taking oft-legitimate complaints and frustrations about the complexities of adolescence, and giving it a make-up drenched veneer to be mocked.

On the other hand, I have this annoying tendency to play Devil's Advocate. Therefore, it is tempting for me to sypathize with my peers in the face of parental stupidity and societal brusqueness. Nice to see that people have decided to get off the, "Those stupid, shallow teenagers! How inferior they are to us in every way!" bandwagon.

I like to think that I break the mold of teenage angst, although that point of arrogance likely gives me away as not being much different from my peers. I understand (intellectually, at least) that there are people one hell of a lot worse off than I am, as I sit here in an upper-middle class household, well fed, with plenty of leisure time, games, and potential for growth. Even within a few-mile radius of me, there are thousands of people worse of than me economically, emotionally, and societally (in that they didn't have the good luck to be born a white male). I have problems, certainly, but they are rather minor compared to the problems of others. Even with the faux-modesty presented here, I flatter myself.

Perhaps I'm fairly well-adjusted and atypical for my age group, or perhaps I dilude myself- think myself special and others inherently inferior and capable of easy categorization. Perhaps those who brush off teenagers as rash, foolish, and obsessed with the frivolous are the same way. Amazing what prejudices lay buried within our subconscious once we take a good look at them, eh?

...Crap, I did it again- arrogantly assuming that I can psycho-analyze myself while others can't. Bleh, it's like philosophy- if you think about it too long, you just start spinning in circles.

[RHJunior]

Well, that's the thing about Teenagers.. Everything is one huge tragedy to them, if only because it's very new to them: "I can't drive the car? You're Nazis, you know that? "Oh God, I'm NEVER going to get a date! I'll die old and alone!" "my pants dropped in gym class in front of everyone? This is the worst day of my life!"

In all fairness--- Let's put that in ADULT perspective. How well would you handle having your pants fall off in front of, say, the President, the Queen of England, and the Pope while on national television? Because that, proportionally, is what happened to the teenager in question. They were humiliated in front of a mob of people who have the most real influence in their life and their immediate future. If your average adult had to deal with people who made arbitrary and apparently random decisions about when they could or could not have access to transportation, they'd be a little pissy too. And considering the average adult deals with the inability to find a mate by moping, gorging on food, or getting drunk......


It probably IS the worst day of their life.


The hypocrisy of adult expectations is especially stinging. We expect CHILDREN to tolerate day-to-day conditions to which the average adult would respond with a class-action lawsuit. Ask yourself, how long would you tolerate it if every day you went to work, one of your coworkers verbally abused you? Or actually PUNCHED you? Or crowded you into a corner and stole money from your wallet? Or destroyed your personal property? How would you react if you complained about this abuse to the authorities and they told you "you'll just have to learn to deal with those things?"
How would you care to have your status, your reputation, your self-esteem and even your physical safety put in the hands of a mob of strangers with little more personal accountability than a prison gang?

I just described the typical day in high school.


WE throw teenagers, unarmed, unbriefed, and utterly unprepared, into a zoo we couldn't handle as adults, and are astonished at the results.

[SolidusRaccoon]

If I ever have kids there is no way in heck they will ever go to a public school, no way, no how.