"Student Infatuations Become Waste of Time!" or "Time Not Wasted?"

This is a news paper article that was written by a guy I knew in high school, it was published in the school newspaper where he attended. When I saw it I thought that there was something seriously wrong, so I wrote my own counter action which will follow immediately after this.

Student Infatuations Become Waste of Time
By Boze Herrington

Aside from the drug problem, the sex problem, the groping problem, the poor taste in music problem, and the foul and grammatically improbable language problem, students at our school have another problem. This problem may not have reached the pandemic proportions of the sex and drug problems, but it is widespread, and it will only continue if the youth of Alvin don't get their act together.

The problem is that, at the age we are, way too many students have developed young love. This is a silly and meaningless outrage and it cannot go on.

I am not being sarcastic or satirical. I am dead serious. You have fallen into the pit of false compassion, the snare of so-called love. Although very few people realize this ("liking" people is the "cool thing" to "do"), this sorry state brings with it a multitude of heinous difficulties and distractions.

But, before we get into that, where do you think you even got the idea of "liking" in the first place? The same place most ideas seem to come from, the magical land of Hollywood. An old poem goes like this:

Think of all the people who would not be in love

If they had never heard it spoken of.

What drives you to want a boyfriend or girlfriend? Where do you get that fire in your heart that keeps you continuously unsatisfied with just being really good friends (which is, by the way, the best way)? Hollywood and the media, the powerful force behind most of the dissatisfaction you'll have in life. For example, why do you think corporations pay millions of dollars a minute to play you a little commercial during your favorite show? Because they want you to be constantly dissatisfied with what you have so you'll go out and buy more. The whole industry is built on want.

Physics teacher and storyteller Ralph Kryder concurs: Boredom is a word that Hollywood invented to keep you dissatisfied, he says. And he is right, by the way. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, a man can never be bored as long as he has his own mind.

So you would never have known about having a boyfriend or girlfriend if your TV-saturated friends and favorite shows hadn't left you never thinking of an alternative. You have to have your honey, don't you? But all the time, you little realize that you have simply fallen into a big corporate trap.

So now that you know the truth, why not live in the light? A growing number of students have completely renounced liking or going out. For example, sophomore Corey Pauley remarks, I'm so glad I don't like anyone anymore. I have so much more time, and money, to do whatever I want to do, like study and type up notes.

We set ourselves up for future heartbreaks by putting to much trust in the opposite sex, wrote Corey's former girlfriend, Melody Selby. We believe in and dwell on the sweet words they say, neglecting to realize that their promises die along with the relationship, while loosing a best friend along the way.

When Corey and Melody started going out, I thought to myself, I wonder how much money, time and knowledge he will waste on her? Nine months later, it turned out he had wasted more money than Boze has seen in his entire life. It's stupid, pointless and expensive. I hope it doesn't happen to me, said Eric Booth, Corey's close friend. I was just looking out for his interests.

Youthful infatuations take all your time. If you wonder why you're not in the top ten, it's probably because you slacked off and liked someone. For example, I am not in the top ten. Among other things, like a lack of discipline and a certain stupidity when it comes to math or science, this is because I have liked two and a half people. If I ever have any reason to doubt why I am eighty one instead of one, I have Mr. Math Teacher and two and a half Pretty Girls to thank. But of course in the end it's all my fault, for not studying hard enough and liking girls.

At a time when you should be using all your mental energies to study hard, learn all you can, discover your talents and passions, and get into a good college, you have assumed that every day of your life will be just like this one. Well, it won't be. Someday you'll wake up and your baby'll be gone, but there'll be another baby to take his (or her) place, and you'll realize it's not high school anymore. It never can be. College, or a job at the convenience store, cometh. But Alvin High School fades away. Don't fall into the crush at 14, baby at 16, marriage at 18, slow death from then on trap. The chances are that of all the people you now know, you will only talk to two or three ten years along the road from now. All that will matter from this time is what you learned and what you did with it.

So liking people is a waste of time.

You can't see the world when you've got your eyes on the face of one person. Your whole life lies before you, with so much to explore and think and dream and do. Open your eyes and see the beauty in the world and the loveliness of each individual person. Would you confine yourself before your time? You've created your own prison.

Don't fall into the trap. Forget about your boyfriend. Come forward, away from there, and fall in love with life this day.

Now here is my article that I wrote in response.

Time Not Wasted
By Justin Caynon

Drugs, sex and rock and roll, eh? Let's blame the hippies and the communist while we're at it, why don't we. I can't say that I can buy into all that this article says, because it in fact has a lot to do with something that sounds to me like almost a conspiracy theory about the media wanting us to "buy into" love. Real love is not a thing that you can buy, or that can be forced on you.

Love is not what I would call a feeling although it is often categorized as one. Feelings are triggered by something, when we lose a close friend, we might feel sad. If we have a child, we might feel joy. But love is something different altogether. When someone hugs me I don't just suddenly love them right then and then it's gone. We choose to love someone, whether we like to admit it or not.

We choose who we love based on many things, but the keyword is choose. There is no "love at first sight", because we have to get to know that person before we can actually love them.

Humans are creatures of companionship, relations between students are not a pandemic that must be stopped like the Black Death in the Middle Ages. People are going to like other people no matter what anyone thinks or says. The media can't have had the effect of creating this human need for companionship.

The idea that these admirations of the opposite sex arise because of provocation by the media and Hollywood is a preposterous one, Carlen Shoemaker a high school student says, I just don't believe that the media, or anyone or anything else, for that matter, could make me think I love someone. Love isn't something you learn, it's an instinct you have from the time you're born. You don't learn to love your family, you just do, so why should it be any different when you feel that way for someone of the opposite sex who isn't part of your family?

The idea of love being a waste of time is equally preposterous. Loving someone else cannot be a waste of time, because anything that shows charity and kindness towards another human being is not a waste of time.

Another high school student Jessica Richardson has this to say on the issue, Liking people is a waste of time? Not in my life or many other's. Sure, high school love probably won't go far but it's the experience that counts. Many people don't get to experience having a boyfriend or girlfriend, or feeling that 'young love'. Many of those people turn lonely, and fall into a depression. Therefore, their grades slip and they spend their time locked up in their room contemplating suicide because they think that not one likes them.

Even here we have the idea that being all alone can cause way more angst than being with someone else. Just liking someone without dating them can sometimes make you feel better than trying to avoid them all together. But even if you are just "good friends" there will always be that question in the back of your mind, What if?

And that question can cause its own host of problems and even lower some grades as Jessica said.

The idea of liking someone being the cool thing to do is, to me, not always the case. While there are people who will go out just to get this image that we're beautiful and together there are those out there, who couldn't care less about what the world thinks of who they are dating or like. And I defiantly don't see how someone can call money spent on another person who is special to you money wasted.

Money is just an object, something that is passed from one person to the next, and something that people put far too much trust in. The value of money rises and falls from time to time, the value of a human and someone by your side never changes.

You can't put a dollar value on the things shared between you and another person. You can't put a price sticker on the beauty you see when you look into that other person's eyes. And out of all the things you can find in nature, I would rather feel that. All relationships do not lead to ultimately sex. And a relationship seeking that kind of selfish gratification is almost always started the count down on it's own doomsday clock.

No relationship is free of sacrifice, because that's what boyfriend/girlfriend relationships are, a sacrifice of one's needs to help another person. When you tell someone you like them you leave yourself emotionally open, you weaken the defenses that humans put up to pain and hurt out.

But in truth without pain and hurt every once and a while, we aren't really living life. And high school is a time for us to test the waters of relationships and see what works for us. It's a time for us to learn not just academically, but emotionally. Within four years we might be in college, and it is not a good thing to go out into the world with a fetal idea of what being involved in a relationship is.

I will admit, love can hurt, it can hurt like hell and leave scars for a lifetime. But it can also heal other scars and give us some of the greatest feelings in the world. Maybe the words boyfriend and girlfriend wouldn't exist if not for the media, but the idea still would. It's in our nature to come to care about those that we are close to. And to care even more about certain people who we share some common link with. A common bond is what makes us human, after all.

The young love we experience now helps us to mature and grow as humans. It helps us to understand the opposite sex and form bonds with them. Any relationship takes time and effort, just like school work does. The important thing is to balance the two, you must bring order to the chaos of life and find an equilibrium that allows time for both.

Don't blame someone you like just because you spent time with them and things didn't work out just how you thought they should. Cherish the time with them, or the time that you spent with them rather. Failure is part of life, but its when we give up that we truly lose out. By giving up on young love you've given up on a critical part of development.

Liking people is not a waste of time, it's a part of life.

Maybe you can't see all of the beauty of the world when your concentrating on the person you like, but maybe you don't need to. Maybe you can see all of that beauty in their eyes, even if for a brief time. Chances are we won't talk to all the people we know now in ten years. But those three or four we still talk to might be the best friends we have out of them all, and one of those three or four be that special someone we want to spend the rest of our life with.

That's it, I wrote this a few years back and so did the other person, I'm sure that his views have adjusted by now. But I will write a little more on this subject in another blog since this one is already too long.