Stop the discrimination!

I felt that in chapter 7 and 8, we were bombarded by tons of statistics and even though I realized some of them were very old and outdated, I still got very angry at what I learned. I believe the whole point these chapters were trying to make is that adolescents and teens really aren’t all that bad and most of the stereotypes are ones created for them, or ones put on them through the way society is set up. More times than one, it was mentioned that the discrimination against teens is much like the discrimination against a group of minorities based on their race, religion, gender, or social/economical status. And the more I thought about it, the more I started to remember what it felt like to be an adolescent – always told what to do, always told what’s wrong with “our generation,” always looked at as if I was trouble. I’m not saying that all people saw me and my friends like that but the instances that do stick out are very profound. For example, I remember being told in the grocery store when me and my friends were buying candy that we couldn’t check out in the full service line because we only had 4 or 5 things, we were supposed to check out in the express lane (which had more people in line than the full service lane). I couldn’t help but think “I wonder if I was 70 years old and with a cane, if the cashier would have yelled at me for something as stupid and as unimportant as this.” Another fear me and my friends had were the police – not because we were bad kids or doing bad things, only because we’ve had experiences and we’ve heard of people our age with experience that cops pull over young people because they automatically suspect we are up to no good. And I have gotten guns pulled out on me because I was double parked with my blinkers on waiting for my friend to come out of his house so we could go to a movie. Their excuse: “we thought she was trying to get away from us!” (I hadn’t moved the gear out of Park). Another instance I’m reminded of happened in Franklin when three high school guys went around caroling with their guitars during the Christmas season last year, the Franklin cops took all three of them to jail because they accused them of having drugs, even though they searched their car and body searched them and couldn’t find any. The three of them said that they will no longer be Christmas caroling because of the humiliating experience they had that year. I just don’t see why people can buy into the “fact” that all teens are just bad people who have sex, get drunk, and do drugs. After all, it can’t just be teenagers – what happens when you turn twenty? Do these shameful adolescents all of a sudden grow up overnight and stop all of these bad habits? Of course not! If all teenagers were bad people, then that means that we have a lot of bad people as products from the bad teenagers and I believe most people will agree that not all people are drug, sex, and alcohol addicts. Even if people see teens as a problematic group of people, then (like Mike Males suggests) we should look at the cause for this and the cause for this effect is just how society shapes our teens and adolescents. How can we help society so future teenagers won’t have to go through the humiliating and undeserved discrimination we all had to go through when we were teenagers?