I am sick and tired of people who think it is their obligation to educate the naive and ignorant youth about matters that are only important to them. The other day I was out for frozen yogurt with a couple of my friends when a man sitting behind me decided that our conversation—about the idiotic institution of self-important teenagers called Youth Educators who go and feel good about themselves while they lecture bored eighth graders about high school and drugs—exhibited an air of dissatisfaction amongst us. Regardless of the fact that this couldn’t be further from the truth, who the hell does he think he is telling us how we should or should not be spending our last weeks of high school?
Apparently he had grown up in the wealthy town that we currently live in, so he quickly identified us as careless rich snobs who are indifferent to the world around us and should enjoy high school and do what we want instead of succumbing to the status quo—yet heed his pointless advice that I cannot even mock because he mostly just rambled about how he loves us as much as he loves his nieces, and how we shouldn’t worry about Piedmont’s excessive pressure to go to Cal or Stanford and instead go to Harvard or MIT. I wanted to tell him that I thought he was a fucked up asshole who cared about perfect strangers more than his own family, and that I could make my own goddamn choices and all I was retaining from our conversation was that people are morons.
His most aggravating intrusion into our previously lovely dessert outing was his mostly correct assumption that we had never seen ‘real’ poverty. People who say this to me make me boil on so many levels. Allow me to begin with the most obvious. Duh! I’m seventeen years old! What opportunity would I have to encounter such a thing? Am I expected to have also worked full time, or legally gone to a bar? There are many factions of life that thus far I have not experienced, and to shove that in my face is like me telling a baby to blow me because he can’t walk yet.
But seriously, on a more holistic level, why should I need to have witnessed extreme destitution first hand to understand it and appreciate my good fortune? I’m fed up with people and their “I’m better than you now because I’ve seen poverty” meaningful and life-changing experiences. They’ll say, “you haven’t seen poverty,” meaning “you don’t know shit about anything.” These are the same arrogant do-gooders who write books called “How to be a Success.” I know so many teenagers who go to Honduras or Tanzania for a month and come back wearing duct-tape sandals and a shmata because now they relate to poor Africans who can’t shower. Yes, I am privileged and I feel damn lucky that I have such a wonderful life, so why don’t I save the $3,000 dollars I’ll raise selling grapefruits so that I can travel to some country and appreciate my life and instead put it towards helping the poor families in Oakland who really need it? How come they are forgotten by all of these affluent hippies who don’t grasp that growing up as one of four kids on Fruitvale Ave. at East 14 Street with a single Meth-addict mother can be just as difficult as living in a dirt field in South America?
Many believe that they have reached enlightenment while on one of these trips. If you are so god damn enlightened, then you don’t need to share it with me! Be content with yourself and go and live in a forest with some freeze-dried nachos and an Allen Ginsberg anthology and stop thinking that you are better than me or anyone else because you sacrificed your summer for the better good of your college application and felt good about yourself.
It is pretty stuck-up to assume that a person can only appreciate the intricacies of the world if he or she witnesses them first hand. What about the poor people in India who cannot afford to travel to Mexico to meet the poor people there? Are the Indians any less interesting because of that? And if they are cultureless, then why do we become more sophisticated if we visit them? This is why I hate the new movie, The Passion of the Christ. Even if you argue that it is absolutely important to understand the events that led up to Christ’s death, why must we learn how he died? Should television news stations zoom in on the needle entering the Unabomber’s arm at his lethal injection? Ought I travel back in time to the Holocaust yielding a Sony DCR-VX2100 with its new Advanced HAD™ progressive scan CCD technology and film the grotesque details of Jews suffering as they died in gas chambers, or can I just read my textbook and realize that it was a really, really shitty time?
People can enlighten themselves however they want, but if they are narcissistic enough to tell me what I should do with my life, then I’m going to be pissed. And if these people think that the only way to educate oneself is by hands on experience, then they are the ones who really don’t appreciate how fortunate they are to be able to travel around the world studying. I say learn all you can and enjoy your life and your blessings, but don’t forget to count them, too.