I knew it was going to be a bad day when my alarm went off at 7:15 this morning. Homework unfinished and hair unwashed, I raced to the school in my red Toyota Camry only to find that the check engine and low gas lights were on. Not only did I manage to drive through the pothole in the parking lot, I lost two followers on my twitter account that morning. Three pop quizzes and incomplete homework checks later, all I wanted to do was go home and curl up in a ball. I know, I have the rough life of the privileged suburban teenager.
These are what we like to call #firstworldproblems. It’s these little things that consume our minds to believe that our problems are the most important in the world. This is sadly the mind of the typical American teenager; the biggest challenge of the day is how to last four whole hours until lunch because breakfast was skipped this morning. We teens are mad because our high school wi-fi blocked Instagram and now we can’t go look at filtered photos of food instead of paying attention in Calculus. We teens are mad because this year they changed the schedule for finals and now we have to actually stay the whole school day to take a whole bunch of dumb test. We teens are mad because the stupid underclassmen are dissecting pigs for Biology and now the whole hallway of lockers in the science wing smell like rotting pig mixed with formaldehyde and freshman. We teens are mad because the Dell laptops at school are too slow and the fact that Solon High School hasn’t updated to MacBooks yet is just wrong and cruel.
While families forced out on the street in inner Cleveland because they don’t have enough money to stay anywhere, we teens are mad. While innocent marathon runners in Boston lost their lives due to an unspeakable fate, we teens are mad. While some teenagers our age are fighting to find the bare necessities of life and protecting their children and families, we teens are mad. While our economy is slipping deeper and deeper into a sinkhole of debt, we teens are mad.
Really? In our age of wisdom and knowledge, this is what we care about?
Are we really that shallow?