Post by Adonis Matthews on Jun 5, 2010 14:58:33 GMT -5
High school. The doors to your destiny. These four years will be the point that you will find yourself planted firmly into the path of success, through good grades and hard work. After excelling in these four years you will find acceptance into a good college with the hopes of an even better degree so you can make lots and lots of money and thusly rule the world.
If you don‘t, you‘ll find nothing but squalor awaiting you. Forget work. Nothing good ever comes from 'just a good honest day‘s work'. Not anymore. If you fail at school you‘ll obviously fail at life. So you have to learn this lesson now. If you don‘t, look at what you‘ll become. See that janitor that you've always sneered at? Or that hobo that you‘ll think is going to kill you in an alley while screaming about something incoherent?
That, my dear friends, will be you.
How can you avoid that? A big fish coming into a small pond? Let me share with you what your first year will be like.
You‘ll spend all of that summer begging for your parents to home-school you.
Beg on your knees with all of the promises that you can pull out of your pocket combined with whatever childlike innocence you have left. The eyes, you know the ones, the big puppy dog doe eyes of wonder and hurt innocence that makes their parental instincts scream out to acquiesce to your every whim. Why? Because you‘ll know, deep down, that all of those 'FRESHMEN MUST DIE' stories are true. Every last one of them. So you‘ll beg and plead and hope they‘ll give you what you want, this one last time.
But they won‘t buy it.
They‘ll ship you off to your huge new school with all of its shiny brilliance and large, transparent windows, and you‘ll stand there for several moments on that first day, right outside the door, looking up at it. And you‘ll think that it just might be okay that you‘re here. That you won‘t be in any kind of danger or you won‘t have the older kids, kids that you knew just a few years before in some cases, attacking you.
And then out of nowhere, a hand connects with your shoulder, and shoves you, forcibly, into the wall. 'Move, Freshman!' A voice sneers from the spot that you had been standing in before. A senior stands there, glorified and powerful, with all of their 'big bad almost-adult‘ hormones screaming for you to submit to them. And you almost resist.
Almost.
Then before you know it your eyes lower and they chuckle, darkly. Leaving you almost wishing to run away. But you can‘t. For if you do you know your parents will find out. And then tomorrow, they‘ll do the thing even worse than anything that any senior could even dream up. They‘d walk to school with you, take you inside, and walk with you to your first class.
The horror.
So you wait for the doors to open and close, sealing the senior away from you. Then, resolutely, you square your shoulders, straighten your posture and open the door. You step inside, backpack swung over one shoulder, schedule clamped securely in your hands. The door closes behind you with a loud BANG. And as soon as you do, you know that it‘s over.
You‘re inside, and there‘s no escaping until the end of the day.
Almost immediately you hear screams from down the hall. Screams of other freshmen who refused to submit to the hierarchy of the high school. Those poor, hapless fools who you no longer will call your friends, for fear of being associated with them and getting yourself tortured even more.
Your eyes automatically widen and lower as you pass the first group, dressed in a way that would seem…. Royal. They snicker and sneer, tilting their heads up more, strutting with their superiority.
You know what they are. And so do they.
They are the seniors.
And you are royally screwed.
You continue down the hall, not pausing to look up until you come to a blockade. The seniors have created a stage out of tables and have forced all of the freshmen in front of it. The other grades, sophomores and juniors, are flanking either side, standing in lines and watching the stage expectantly, not seeming to notice that the rest of the senior class has come up behind you and the other freshmen, hemming you in and preventing your escape.
But you notice.
All of a sudden three seniors come up onto the stage and a hush falls over the crowd. "Greetings to my fellow seniors, and welcome back to the former dogs of years gone by. For those of you who don‘t know" There will be a pregnant pause, and all of the eyes will turn to you. You‘ll fidget and think you should just melt into a puddle, but you won‘t be able to look away. "I am your president. I am your KING!" Screams will erupt around you and the excitement will build. Then hands will come onto your shoulders and shove you to your knees in a respectful bow.
You‘ll start to tremble and wish to pass out, and you‘ll notice that some of your fellow classmates already have.
Let's fast forward a few years.
You've moved from that awkward freshman, wide eyed and wanting to change the world, to the royal seniors, still wanting to change the world but more reserved, less separate from a pack.
It's the eve of your graduation, and you you have to give a speech on what your class did to help make the school a better place. It's what you wanted to do. But instead, you moved with the pack, you kept yourself from standing out and getting hammered back 'into place'. You look at the freshmen and think 'we were just as bad as the seniors were when I was a freshman' and so you do what you've always wanted to do but never could bring yourself to do to your classmates. You tell them the truth.
You tell them that when you were a freshman you wanted to change how things were run. You wanted to make it so everyone was equal and freshmen could be friends with seniors and nobody would have to worry about getting shoved into trashcans or lockers. You say that as a class that never happened, even though all of them had dreamed something similar.
"But don't lose heart" you say, "Because our time is now. We've been told for years that high school is the door to your destiny. And that's the truth. The door closes behind you freshman year, but it's opening again. We're going back out to the world again with those wide eyes and bright ideas. But I implore you, don't let those dreams die again. We can change the world. We are the ones that can change how everything is run, change how everything works. Make everything better. Don't let that door close on your mind again. We are the future."
If you don‘t, you‘ll find nothing but squalor awaiting you. Forget work. Nothing good ever comes from 'just a good honest day‘s work'. Not anymore. If you fail at school you‘ll obviously fail at life. So you have to learn this lesson now. If you don‘t, look at what you‘ll become. See that janitor that you've always sneered at? Or that hobo that you‘ll think is going to kill you in an alley while screaming about something incoherent?
That, my dear friends, will be you.
How can you avoid that? A big fish coming into a small pond? Let me share with you what your first year will be like.
You‘ll spend all of that summer begging for your parents to home-school you.
Beg on your knees with all of the promises that you can pull out of your pocket combined with whatever childlike innocence you have left. The eyes, you know the ones, the big puppy dog doe eyes of wonder and hurt innocence that makes their parental instincts scream out to acquiesce to your every whim. Why? Because you‘ll know, deep down, that all of those 'FRESHMEN MUST DIE' stories are true. Every last one of them. So you‘ll beg and plead and hope they‘ll give you what you want, this one last time.
But they won‘t buy it.
They‘ll ship you off to your huge new school with all of its shiny brilliance and large, transparent windows, and you‘ll stand there for several moments on that first day, right outside the door, looking up at it. And you‘ll think that it just might be okay that you‘re here. That you won‘t be in any kind of danger or you won‘t have the older kids, kids that you knew just a few years before in some cases, attacking you.
And then out of nowhere, a hand connects with your shoulder, and shoves you, forcibly, into the wall. 'Move, Freshman!' A voice sneers from the spot that you had been standing in before. A senior stands there, glorified and powerful, with all of their 'big bad almost-adult‘ hormones screaming for you to submit to them. And you almost resist.
Almost.
Then before you know it your eyes lower and they chuckle, darkly. Leaving you almost wishing to run away. But you can‘t. For if you do you know your parents will find out. And then tomorrow, they‘ll do the thing even worse than anything that any senior could even dream up. They‘d walk to school with you, take you inside, and walk with you to your first class.
The horror.
So you wait for the doors to open and close, sealing the senior away from you. Then, resolutely, you square your shoulders, straighten your posture and open the door. You step inside, backpack swung over one shoulder, schedule clamped securely in your hands. The door closes behind you with a loud BANG. And as soon as you do, you know that it‘s over.
You‘re inside, and there‘s no escaping until the end of the day.
Almost immediately you hear screams from down the hall. Screams of other freshmen who refused to submit to the hierarchy of the high school. Those poor, hapless fools who you no longer will call your friends, for fear of being associated with them and getting yourself tortured even more.
Your eyes automatically widen and lower as you pass the first group, dressed in a way that would seem…. Royal. They snicker and sneer, tilting their heads up more, strutting with their superiority.
You know what they are. And so do they.
They are the seniors.
And you are royally screwed.
You continue down the hall, not pausing to look up until you come to a blockade. The seniors have created a stage out of tables and have forced all of the freshmen in front of it. The other grades, sophomores and juniors, are flanking either side, standing in lines and watching the stage expectantly, not seeming to notice that the rest of the senior class has come up behind you and the other freshmen, hemming you in and preventing your escape.
But you notice.
All of a sudden three seniors come up onto the stage and a hush falls over the crowd. "Greetings to my fellow seniors, and welcome back to the former dogs of years gone by. For those of you who don‘t know" There will be a pregnant pause, and all of the eyes will turn to you. You‘ll fidget and think you should just melt into a puddle, but you won‘t be able to look away. "I am your president. I am your KING!" Screams will erupt around you and the excitement will build. Then hands will come onto your shoulders and shove you to your knees in a respectful bow.
You‘ll start to tremble and wish to pass out, and you‘ll notice that some of your fellow classmates already have.
Let's fast forward a few years.
You've moved from that awkward freshman, wide eyed and wanting to change the world, to the royal seniors, still wanting to change the world but more reserved, less separate from a pack.
It's the eve of your graduation, and you you have to give a speech on what your class did to help make the school a better place. It's what you wanted to do. But instead, you moved with the pack, you kept yourself from standing out and getting hammered back 'into place'. You look at the freshmen and think 'we were just as bad as the seniors were when I was a freshman' and so you do what you've always wanted to do but never could bring yourself to do to your classmates. You tell them the truth.
You tell them that when you were a freshman you wanted to change how things were run. You wanted to make it so everyone was equal and freshmen could be friends with seniors and nobody would have to worry about getting shoved into trashcans or lockers. You say that as a class that never happened, even though all of them had dreamed something similar.
"But don't lose heart" you say, "Because our time is now. We've been told for years that high school is the door to your destiny. And that's the truth. The door closes behind you freshman year, but it's opening again. We're going back out to the world again with those wide eyes and bright ideas. But I implore you, don't let those dreams die again. We can change the world. We are the ones that can change how everything is run, change how everything works. Make everything better. Don't let that door close on your mind again. We are the future."
