Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Pretty Tyrants

Adults in a Texas town are shocked (shocked!) to find out that a group of cheerleaders at McKinney North High School have been acting like entitled little shits for some time with relative impunity. Pardon my disbelief, but a society whose commanding truths are, "'Tis better to be young than old, better to be rich than poor, and better to be pretty than plain", really has no place chastising its 'winners' for behaving with contempt towards its 'losers'. The little shits in question seem to have simply made explicit what's already implicit in the culture.

No doubt, even worse than being old is being an authority figure in a culture that hates being told it can't do whatever it wants.

"When one teacher told a squad member to quit chatting on her cell phone in class, the girl replied, 'Shut up, I'm talking to my Mom.' On a separate occasion, she offered this response to the teacher's reprimand: 'Pull your panties out of a wad.' 'Gang members were nothing compared to these girls,' the teacher told Jones. 'They believe they cannot be touched.'

These stories are painfully commonplace. Usually we hear about them because one of those farty old authority figures lets the media in on the bastion of philistinism that is American education. And everyone pretends to be shocked. The common denominator in these sort of stories is always the following: The adult who desperately wants to appear 'cool' to the kids. Here it's the principle who apparently made life miserable for the losers (read: educators) who tried to treat the winners (read: popular teenagers) as if they were undeveloped.

Said the investigator who reported on all of this:
"Kids will be kids, but adults have to be adults," he wrote. "Sadly, in this saga, I was struck by the reticence of many adults to accept the role of 'being the grown-up'."

Or inability.

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