Welcome to 2004, home of a fast-paced, well-regimented and highly technologically advanced American society.
Our clocks run on time (for the most part), our government is belting out laws (as they should be), and our children are getting a great chance at education. The media tells us what we are supposed to know and most people eat it up along with a healthy dose of vitamins, which coincide with their latest diet.
Most people have fixed their lives into an easy flow, planning their activities months in advance, doing their jobs like all good citizens do, but if you ask the average American if they are happy, what do you think the answer would be? Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I could almost guarantee that a good percentage would say they are highly unhappy.
There could be millions of reasons for the surge of depression, suicide, alcoholism and purchasing of weapons that has descended up the American people like a hail storm in the middle of summer, but one that I think is the most stifling to me as a teenager is the lack of individuality in our society.
Most people would blame it on much worse problems in our country, like the fact that we are consumer driven and highly capitalist. The religious might say that not enough people believe in God. Some might even blame it on our president or current global affairs. In the land of the free, how could it be that we are suffering from a lack of individuality? Even if we were having trouble in that department, how could that cause widespread depression? Aren't people more comfortable when they belong to a group?
Let me tell you now that I will use any excuse to make myself seem different from other people. As a teenager, I feel classified. No matter what my friends or I do, we will always fall into a category. We are automatically judged and catalogued as a certain type of person by others around us.
The girl standing next to you could probably make her mind up about who she thinks you are just by looking at the way you cut your hair. To tell the truth, I think I speak for almost everyone when I say that I wish to be known and then judged. It's like a huge teacher in the sky has given the people a horrible test and then declared that everyone has failed it without the teacher even once explaining the subject matter. We live in such a connected society nowadays that the only way to keep track of all the people around us is to put them into categories. Stereotypes have always existed.
Today, the media shows us what we are supposed to want to see. If they find something particularly appealing to the public (like football or the television show "Friends") they will use that same thing over and over again to keep their ratings up. Every once in a while, something different will happen, like the beginning of the reality television movement. The populous loved how new and different it was, but now I'm so sick of "Survivor" and "Fear Factor" that I refuse to watch television. We are so starved for something new and improved that Mattel broke up Barbie and Ken and actually managed to get news coverage on it!
At Anzar we have a huge amount of clubs that is totally disproportionate to the meager amount of students that we actually have attending. Students wanting a new way to express themselves form new groups aimed at unhinging other people, which is a little counter-intuitive seeing as they want to be different from others. Forming groups with others just makes more people like themselves, but even so, as a result groups like the Communist Club were born, as was the newly formed Scottish Mafia. Neither one of them really advocated what their name stands for (especially not the mafia bit), but it is the closest shot a lot of students feel they have to forming an individual niche for themselves.
High schoolers form bands to be individual as well, but those bands are all either rock, punk or some other form of pre-established sound. Maybe all of those video games and television commercials really have limited our minds. What ever happened to playing with a box and imagining a castle?
Anzar is so small that it is hard to form broad generalizations about any one group because groups don't have solid boundaries. They are always intermingling, but even as that is taking place, the students' academic lives are kicking in as well. They are forced still onward in their fight for good grades and sufficient S.A.T. scores so that they can get into the college of their choice.
Even as they are doing this, they still know that the struggle isn't really for college, but for the job and normal life, which will ensue after their toil.
"Back in the day, you could have your heart set on being a shoe shiner or a hat maker, but, these days, if you don't go to college, you're going to be working at Burger King," said junior Bryce Galvan.
He confided in me that he felt he could never find something he wanted to do and make a living out of it. Working at Burger King is all well and good if you like the monotonous drone of "Would you like fries with that?" day in and day out, but most teenagers want more than that, even if it is the stereotypical teenage job. In order to achieve a route to being yourself effectively, we must conform enough to have the colleges accept us. How does that make sense?
I'm a writer and always have been, so a group of students and I along with a trusted teacher formed a creative writing club. When talking to a friend about it later, I found that her next question was about which colleges I knew of that had sufficient literature major programs for me. Would learning what other people wrote in the past help me to be more creative? How can we break out of the lack of individuality in our society by trying to replicate what others have found to be successful?
Not all things in our society are bad, though. We have a whole lot to be thankful for. Maybe we just have so much to do and so much of an opportunity to do it that everything has been done. Isn't everything we think of just built off of things others have told us throughout our lives? Without unique thoughts, how can we be individuals? Maybe in a world as connected as ours, there is no way to express your differences effectively in a way that hasn't already been tried.
Until there is a way, though, I'm sure we teens will continue listening to strange music, dying our hair unnatural colors and coming up with new words for things that haven't been invented yet, just to be weird. Who knows? Maybe it will make us just a bit happier for a while.
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