Mes Souhaites

I find it interesting that the ONDCP is running a set of ads that I'm pretty sure were produced by someone blazed out of their mind. My favorite is the one where the stoner guy gets dumped for an alien.

This new set particularly emphasizes the dangers of being a stoner loser. Start getting high and your respectable friends will be disappointed in you. Eventually you'll be all alone with only the devil weed to keep you company. I think it is still a strong enough image in our society to use with some effectiveness, but these ads are a really weird way of doing it.

They're just an interesting change of pace from the "if all you friends jumped off a cliff" tact that the last ones used. Perhaps they simply realized that yes, the average 15 year old would be more than happy to follow their friends off a cliff.

At the reunion in Cookeville I was talking to someone who works with high schoolers and found it really interesting to hear him use the exact same term to describe them that my mom, a high school teacher, has used: "entitlement."

We're America. We consume. That's sort of our thing in the international arena. We consume stuff and get into wars. Well, our kids consume and they don't even have to go to a job to get what they want. The problem that I've heard described by people who work with them is they're not accustomed to putting forth effort. It is too easy to just keep coasting and doing whatever you feel like until you crash.

I'm fine with drug education, but it needs to be education. Put the 45 year old McDonald's fry cook on the TV talking about how he spent his teens baked out of his mind and never graduated from high school. Put the EMT on talking about having to hunt through the bushes to find the severed leg of the drunk dumbass that went over the divider. Put the 30 year old meth head with no teeth and looks 60. Get these people to tell the real stories of the real world and what happens if you don't get your shit together.

Don't tell me my dog is going to be disappointed in me. Don't tell me my girlfriend will leave me for an alien. Don't even tell me my life will go nowhere. I watch TV. I walk down the street. I know that tons of people with jobs drink and I'm pretty sure some of them get high. Their lives didn't go to shit, why is mine going to? All that needs to be done is put someone on the screen that people identify with who can give a realistic story explaining how not learning moderation can leave you miserable.

Moderation would be a harder message to sell since teenagers are pretty much retarded.

I was thinking about an argument for my teenager when I, inch'allah, have one someday. We have reduced culpability for crimes for minors. We have special laws governing their behavior. We essentially say that they are not complete people capable of making decisions for themselves. We've had lots of second class citizens through the years in America, blacks and women foremost among them. As history progressed, some people from these groups made it into the mainstream and always some stood up and spoke for their downtrodden brethren. Well, with teenagers pretty much everyone makes it into the mainstream and you don't hear many people clamoring against the plight of the downtrodden teenager. Could this perhaps be because most people recognize that the man was right and they actually were retarded?

Here's an interesting exercise… Go someplace relatively cheap, like a drug store or a gas station, and imagine yourself for a brief period a member of the local royalty and this store a part of your demense. Walk the aisles knowing that you own everything and anything you would like to take is already yours. Being royalty, you are incredibly sexy and you can also eat anything you like without fear of the repercussions.

( Consume! )