Student Outlook -- Matt Meredith

Thousands of teens, myself among them, graduated over the last few

weeks. I graduated on Thursday. The end of my 38-hour day closed a year

of scandal and social drama.

This past school year, relationships were broken off, insults were

traded and gossip slithered across carpets and through air vents like

smoke. Even through graduation night, which should have been a joyous

celebration, tears were shed left and right. Tears of happiness, of

course, but also tears of hurt.

The drama has not been limited to the lives of high school seniors,

though. This year, every time Principal Michael Vossen crossed the street

without looking both ways, it was covered in the newspaper. In fact, the

kind of stories that ran in this year’s papers made a quarter-point drop

in the Dow Jones look the second Great Depression.

This kind of crisis inflation happens every year. I wonder, what makes

human beings so attracted to drama? Kids my age want to feel pain and

suffering, or at least make sure the kid next to them does. Stories about

lewd sexual affairs that shouldn’t have even happened in the first place

shoot through school halls faster than Michael Johnson on steroids.

Whoever wasn’t a part of them wants to hear every tiny, insignificant

little detail from multiple sources. It never ceases to amaze me.

At the expense of sounding like parents at the dinner table, people

are starving in China. But let’s face it, parents at the dinner table who

work all day to put the food on the table and don’t have time to hear

about the latest news from the cheerleading department know what they’re

talking about. People are starving in China, just as people are exploited

in Thailand and killed in Israel. The ozone layer is being depleted,

animals are becoming extinct and the fossil fuels that men die over right

now will be nonexistent in 50 years. There are problems in the world, and

not one of them has to do with prom night.

But people’s attraction to social drama is understandable. The real

problems of the world are so big and far away, it seems impossible to do

anything about them and therefore pointless to care about them.

Insignificant, local problems are manageable. Why worry about whether

or not a Palestinian state will be created when I can worry about whether

or not my friend is mad at me because I blew her off a week ago? We

create the problems and so we can control them. But they can also control

us.

I urge everyone, look at the big picture. Does social drama really

matter? It’s just a waste of time, energy and emotion. Spend energy on

things that are important and solve small problems instead of letting

them get bigger and uglier as time goes on.

I’m going to college next year, where I have to live by myself and

decide what to do with the rest of my life. I don’t have the strength

left to gossip. If I have a problem with one of my friends, I simply talk

to them about it. Most of my friends can’t do this because they think

flatly bringing something up could be painful. Well, sometimes the truth

hurts, but avoiding the truth always hurts more. Take care of your

troubles, extinguish gossip, focus on real problems -- and finish your

dinner. There are people starving in China.

* MATT MEREDITH just graduated from Newport Harbor High School and

writes occasional columns for the Community Forum section.