Could You Be A 21st Century Teen?
Adults have forgotten what it’s like to be a teen, and they wouldn’t survive one day in a teenager’s body now. What with the pressure of deciding your future before you have even had a half decent chance at living; and the rabid underworld of drugs that is so easy to access if you’re under 19 and gullible. Most suicide and ASBO statistics are from the teen age range. Most of the time you’re judged on your clothes, or whether you have the latest phone or MP3 player, without even consulting your personality. Could you live like that?
Imagine being a part of a culture where music is more important that literature, where history is documented through poetry and lyrics. Lyrics that most of the time aren’t even English, they are a tiny diversification of slang, made up so that most adults can't understand what the hell they are going on about. Where swear words are more common than connectives, and no one puts the ‘g’ in ‘ing’. Where you need an interpreter just to read an e-mail or text message.
Picture yourself sat in your room night after night with a pile of homework, knowing that unless you finish it you’re going to have to spend even longer with that teacher you loathe and despise, in detention for incomplete work. Being under the pressure to go out to a party, where the alcohol runs like tap water and drugs are as easy to get hold of as a bag of crisps. The parties where condoms are like a foreign language and the girls kiss each other to get the guys.
What about when normal is good but common is bad and normal is common, confused? Welcome to the life of a teenager in the 21st century. Make-up and clothes are more important than learning how to cook or iron for girls, and gadgets and sports are more important to boys than getting a job. In a life where illegal is cool and abiding the law is boring, a life where dropping out before you’re 16 is a good thing, and getting an A* means you’re a bad person for doing something well where others couldn’t.
Try this on for a tight fit, sitting in a classroom with around thirty people, where only five of you want to do any work, and the rest just sit and either do nothing or run around like they’re possessed. The behaviour control system isn’t backed up by the criminal justice system, and the curriculum is corrupted by undiscovered plagiarism and kids that pay the smart ones to do their work for them. You want to know why they do it? Well the ones paying want to ‘have a life’ and the ones being paid need the money so they can be judged on their phone or MP3 player.
Authority is only given to the leader of their specific group, the top dog. The word of anyone over 19 is taken like salt in the wind, and advice is seen as orders to be ignored. TV is the only way adults get through to teens, and it’s full of bloodshed, drugs, drink and the wonderful array of colourful words that spill like skittles from actor’s mouths.
Could you survive in a place where the only people you want to talk to are the ones you ‘trust’ until you have an argument and then everyone knows everything? In a place that needs you to have perfect hair and nails if you’re female, or a tattoo and muscles if you’re male. What about hiding your face if you think you have the wrong colour eyes or hair? Hormones raging and spots flaring up, stress and depression are the diagnosis for every common aliment there is, and no one will listen to you because you’re too old or too young to do everything. You’re ripped limb from limb for being a minority or supporting a minority, and voicing that you are.
Want to be a teenager in the 21st Century? Still think we have it easy? Didn’t think so, next time you feel like strangling your teenager, just try and think back to this and think again.
Imagine being a part of a culture where music is more important that literature, where history is documented through poetry and lyrics. Lyrics that most of the time aren’t even English, they are a tiny diversification of slang, made up so that most adults can't understand what the hell they are going on about. Where swear words are more common than connectives, and no one puts the ‘g’ in ‘ing’. Where you need an interpreter just to read an e-mail or text message.
Picture yourself sat in your room night after night with a pile of homework, knowing that unless you finish it you’re going to have to spend even longer with that teacher you loathe and despise, in detention for incomplete work. Being under the pressure to go out to a party, where the alcohol runs like tap water and drugs are as easy to get hold of as a bag of crisps. The parties where condoms are like a foreign language and the girls kiss each other to get the guys.
What about when normal is good but common is bad and normal is common, confused? Welcome to the life of a teenager in the 21st century. Make-up and clothes are more important than learning how to cook or iron for girls, and gadgets and sports are more important to boys than getting a job. In a life where illegal is cool and abiding the law is boring, a life where dropping out before you’re 16 is a good thing, and getting an A* means you’re a bad person for doing something well where others couldn’t.
Try this on for a tight fit, sitting in a classroom with around thirty people, where only five of you want to do any work, and the rest just sit and either do nothing or run around like they’re possessed. The behaviour control system isn’t backed up by the criminal justice system, and the curriculum is corrupted by undiscovered plagiarism and kids that pay the smart ones to do their work for them. You want to know why they do it? Well the ones paying want to ‘have a life’ and the ones being paid need the money so they can be judged on their phone or MP3 player.
Authority is only given to the leader of their specific group, the top dog. The word of anyone over 19 is taken like salt in the wind, and advice is seen as orders to be ignored. TV is the only way adults get through to teens, and it’s full of bloodshed, drugs, drink and the wonderful array of colourful words that spill like skittles from actor’s mouths.
Could you survive in a place where the only people you want to talk to are the ones you ‘trust’ until you have an argument and then everyone knows everything? In a place that needs you to have perfect hair and nails if you’re female, or a tattoo and muscles if you’re male. What about hiding your face if you think you have the wrong colour eyes or hair? Hormones raging and spots flaring up, stress and depression are the diagnosis for every common aliment there is, and no one will listen to you because you’re too old or too young to do everything. You’re ripped limb from limb for being a minority or supporting a minority, and voicing that you are.
Want to be a teenager in the 21st Century? Still think we have it easy? Didn’t think so, next time you feel like strangling your teenager, just try and think back to this and think again.
A Report Regarding the Moral IssuesSurrounding the Space Exploration Programme.
Space exploration is said to be one of the most fascinating things that science has to offer, along with medicine and substantial and affordable computer technology. However, it’s huge costs, not only in cold hard cash, but also in human life, call in to question whether or not we should indeed be ploughing our resources into something a little safer, but just as advancing.
Many of the people whose lives have been lost, in various tragedies over the years of developments in Space Exploration, were bold enough to stand and face, and in some cases blindly ignorant of, the potential dangers to themselves and the people who’s lives they shared. "To me, there's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us, and I choose not to stop doing those things." This was quoted from a Dr. Laurel Clark, who was lost on board Columbia on Febuary the 1st 2003. Astronauts were lost aboard Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger (STS-51L) and the most recent Columbia (STS-107). 21 lives were lost in total.
The families were comforted in the knowledge that Space Exploration carries great risks, and the people they lost were trying to make the world better. The question is should they have to be comforted at all? Recent reports have shown that the explosion of the Challenger flight could have been avoided, and who is to say that all of the astronauts that we have lost could have been saved by small things. Corners that are cut in things like washing up, by leaving a glass on the side to dry naturally instead of drying it up, are seen as acceptable in society, but it is in effect, these things which make it look okay to cut corners in things as important and life threatening as making sure a seal, that was the difference between safety and explosion, would work under current weather conditions or making sure a crew’s air supply would remain non-toxic.
Today’s attitude towards general life is partially to blame for the morals that the Space Exploration programme calls into question, the people in charge often ignore the people who ‘handball’ the things that they are talking about, choosing instead to do whatever they can to keep contracts and make money, leaving the innocent to suffer the consequences of their actions.
As with regards to the sheer costs of the space programme, when millions of people continue to die of cancer, denied NHS funding and such by the governments, countries crying out for money so that they can eat and survive, and when wars rage all round the world, I cannot see why it is necessary to send men (and women) into space. They can come up with excuses about discovering new planets, predicting what will happen in the future and learning about new terrain and elements found in space, but in the end, the things we learn about, most civilians will never see, or be allowed to touch. They believe these things were found because they are told so, and pictures prove nothing, most documentation of space flights are top secret and only information deemed necessary is divulged to the general public.
The fact that we know more about billions of miles of space than we do a few miles of sea is quite worrying, we have names for most craters on the moon, maps of its entire terrain, but there are places on our own planet, inside this atmosphere, that we can't access because more money is spent on Space Exploration than Sea Exploration, having come to the conclusion that there is no life able to be sustained on other planets in our solar system, would our time, money and cost to life not be better spent in learning about our own planet, before sending space crafts to investigate others.
The final point I will make is that the discoveries we have made about space are all well and good, having allowed for the freedom of television and general communication technology, but why do we need to be more advanced than we are now? Why is no one ever happy with staying where they are, you may argue that if people had thought like this before then e wouldn’t be where we are now, but shouldn’t you stop and think that yes, we are here now, but when will we draw the line at the endangerment of our species.
Many of the people whose lives have been lost, in various tragedies over the years of developments in Space Exploration, were bold enough to stand and face, and in some cases blindly ignorant of, the potential dangers to themselves and the people who’s lives they shared. "To me, there's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us, and I choose not to stop doing those things." This was quoted from a Dr. Laurel Clark, who was lost on board Columbia on Febuary the 1st 2003. Astronauts were lost aboard Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger (STS-51L) and the most recent Columbia (STS-107). 21 lives were lost in total.
The families were comforted in the knowledge that Space Exploration carries great risks, and the people they lost were trying to make the world better. The question is should they have to be comforted at all? Recent reports have shown that the explosion of the Challenger flight could have been avoided, and who is to say that all of the astronauts that we have lost could have been saved by small things. Corners that are cut in things like washing up, by leaving a glass on the side to dry naturally instead of drying it up, are seen as acceptable in society, but it is in effect, these things which make it look okay to cut corners in things as important and life threatening as making sure a seal, that was the difference between safety and explosion, would work under current weather conditions or making sure a crew’s air supply would remain non-toxic.
Today’s attitude towards general life is partially to blame for the morals that the Space Exploration programme calls into question, the people in charge often ignore the people who ‘handball’ the things that they are talking about, choosing instead to do whatever they can to keep contracts and make money, leaving the innocent to suffer the consequences of their actions.
As with regards to the sheer costs of the space programme, when millions of people continue to die of cancer, denied NHS funding and such by the governments, countries crying out for money so that they can eat and survive, and when wars rage all round the world, I cannot see why it is necessary to send men (and women) into space. They can come up with excuses about discovering new planets, predicting what will happen in the future and learning about new terrain and elements found in space, but in the end, the things we learn about, most civilians will never see, or be allowed to touch. They believe these things were found because they are told so, and pictures prove nothing, most documentation of space flights are top secret and only information deemed necessary is divulged to the general public.
The fact that we know more about billions of miles of space than we do a few miles of sea is quite worrying, we have names for most craters on the moon, maps of its entire terrain, but there are places on our own planet, inside this atmosphere, that we can't access because more money is spent on Space Exploration than Sea Exploration, having come to the conclusion that there is no life able to be sustained on other planets in our solar system, would our time, money and cost to life not be better spent in learning about our own planet, before sending space crafts to investigate others.
The final point I will make is that the discoveries we have made about space are all well and good, having allowed for the freedom of television and general communication technology, but why do we need to be more advanced than we are now? Why is no one ever happy with staying where they are, you may argue that if people had thought like this before then e wouldn’t be where we are now, but shouldn’t you stop and think that yes, we are here now, but when will we draw the line at the endangerment of our species.
Brits are Bad Eggs When it Comes to Diet
They say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, well I think we can make that ‘the way to a Brit’s heart is through their stomach’. The amount of money we spend a year on food alone is tremendous.
You ask any ‘northerner’ and they’ll tell you that there is nothing like a Sunday Roast withYorkshire puddings, or a good old fish and chips in newspaper on the sea front. Ask a ‘Southerner’ and they might just tell you something totally different. See, in Britain we don’t have a ‘traditional food’ for the whole country, it’s split up. The Scottish have their haggis, the Welsh have their welsh rabbet (cheese on toast), and most of England will agree on fish and chips, though not all.
Like all countries Britain has the general public who you see mindlessly mouthing how many calories they are allowed as they guiltily look over their shoulders at the people who may notice them ‘sinning’ by the sweet rack, these are the British equivalent to ‘healthy eaters’, though most look ill. There are the rare few who actually know something about nutrition, and can so balance their diets. And then there are all the rest of the British civilians, without a clue (or indeed mostly, a care). And these people often go for the convenient option of ready meals and sandwiches.
Some take being ‘convenient’ to the extreme, for instance the only appliance in their kitchen would be a microwave. I was relatively surprised to discover the other day that you can bake cakes in the microwave! And yes they taste the same as an oven made cake too. The population of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ individuals is increasing every year, and although we are living longer and the world wide web gives us all the information we need in order to work out a perfectly balanced diet for every possible type of lifestyle, the frozen dinners section still appears most populated amongst people with ‘no time’.
Though in saying this, the ‘junk food’ industry didn’t stop at pre-cooking and then freeze-packing the food it claims to be good for you. It also invented things such as the cereal bar, which, instead of using milk, they coat and set the cereal in chocolate. Dry packed foods such as ‘super noodles’ are also available, and though may be a suitable option for your every day astronaut; they contain more fat than your average ‘cone of chips’.
A cone of chips is about right for the vegetarians of this country as well, seeing as though battered sausage and fish are off the menu. Vegetarianism is becoming increasingly popular in this ‘save the animal’ world we live in today. And even though around 3% more people develop anaemia each year through not taking iron supplements and not eating red meat, vegetarians and their ‘more strict’ counterparts, the vegan, get a firm pat on the back, and an area of the food market devoted to them. So we even have ‘meat-free’ ready meals, vegetarian restaurants, and notices on the packaging with a little green leaf to show they can eat it safely.
It is quite surprising how the ‘eat in/eat out’ option has changed over the past few years, going from special family outings to the favourite family pub/restaurant maybe once a month, to the weekly MacDonalds trip after the kid’s swimming lesson. Less and less people seem to populate the respectable family run restaurants, and more and more seem to congregate towards fast food courts.
In saying all this though, I’m not so sure that Britain hasn’t adopted the foreign food market over the last decade or so, having recently counted more Chinese takeaways than fish and chip shops in my hometown. And thinking it over, despite the somewhat 12 public houses in the surrounding areas of where I live, I think less than half accommodate family meals, or indeed families on the whole. Indian and Chinese cuisine and the pizza tend to be the most popular options for ‘take out’, but there are other options ranging from Thai and Greek, to Spanish and Mexican if you know where to look.
British eating habits on the whole are medically worrying, but seeing as though the majority of the population don’t ‘have time’ to work out their ‘daily intake’ or indeed be bothered to check to see if the label on their ‘chicken korma and pilau rice’ will aid them in doing so, the nation’s eating habits will remain somewhat amusing, and indeed without much of a relative pattern, except for the abstract though of ‘oh, that’s an interesting packaging’.
You ask any ‘northerner’ and they’ll tell you that there is nothing like a Sunday Roast withYorkshire puddings, or a good old fish and chips in newspaper on the sea front. Ask a ‘Southerner’ and they might just tell you something totally different. See, in Britain we don’t have a ‘traditional food’ for the whole country, it’s split up. The Scottish have their haggis, the Welsh have their welsh rabbet (cheese on toast), and most of England will agree on fish and chips, though not all.
Like all countries Britain has the general public who you see mindlessly mouthing how many calories they are allowed as they guiltily look over their shoulders at the people who may notice them ‘sinning’ by the sweet rack, these are the British equivalent to ‘healthy eaters’, though most look ill. There are the rare few who actually know something about nutrition, and can so balance their diets. And then there are all the rest of the British civilians, without a clue (or indeed mostly, a care). And these people often go for the convenient option of ready meals and sandwiches.
Some take being ‘convenient’ to the extreme, for instance the only appliance in their kitchen would be a microwave. I was relatively surprised to discover the other day that you can bake cakes in the microwave! And yes they taste the same as an oven made cake too. The population of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ individuals is increasing every year, and although we are living longer and the world wide web gives us all the information we need in order to work out a perfectly balanced diet for every possible type of lifestyle, the frozen dinners section still appears most populated amongst people with ‘no time’.
Though in saying this, the ‘junk food’ industry didn’t stop at pre-cooking and then freeze-packing the food it claims to be good for you. It also invented things such as the cereal bar, which, instead of using milk, they coat and set the cereal in chocolate. Dry packed foods such as ‘super noodles’ are also available, and though may be a suitable option for your every day astronaut; they contain more fat than your average ‘cone of chips’.
A cone of chips is about right for the vegetarians of this country as well, seeing as though battered sausage and fish are off the menu. Vegetarianism is becoming increasingly popular in this ‘save the animal’ world we live in today. And even though around 3% more people develop anaemia each year through not taking iron supplements and not eating red meat, vegetarians and their ‘more strict’ counterparts, the vegan, get a firm pat on the back, and an area of the food market devoted to them. So we even have ‘meat-free’ ready meals, vegetarian restaurants, and notices on the packaging with a little green leaf to show they can eat it safely.
It is quite surprising how the ‘eat in/eat out’ option has changed over the past few years, going from special family outings to the favourite family pub/restaurant maybe once a month, to the weekly MacDonalds trip after the kid’s swimming lesson. Less and less people seem to populate the respectable family run restaurants, and more and more seem to congregate towards fast food courts.
In saying all this though, I’m not so sure that Britain hasn’t adopted the foreign food market over the last decade or so, having recently counted more Chinese takeaways than fish and chip shops in my hometown. And thinking it over, despite the somewhat 12 public houses in the surrounding areas of where I live, I think less than half accommodate family meals, or indeed families on the whole. Indian and Chinese cuisine and the pizza tend to be the most popular options for ‘take out’, but there are other options ranging from Thai and Greek, to Spanish and Mexican if you know where to look.
British eating habits on the whole are medically worrying, but seeing as though the majority of the population don’t ‘have time’ to work out their ‘daily intake’ or indeed be bothered to check to see if the label on their ‘chicken korma and pilau rice’ will aid them in doing so, the nation’s eating habits will remain somewhat amusing, and indeed without much of a relative pattern, except for the abstract though of ‘oh, that’s an interesting packaging’.
