Song Stuck In My Head: "For the Love of God" - Steve Vai (a.k.a someone who had to sell his soul to have that sort of guitar skills).
So, would have typed up a less spontaneous post (maybe), but an Earth Day project for school decided to eat up all my time. I'm very passionate about deforestation after all. I mean, how could you ever "slash and burn" forests for money and land? They're the most things (or clusters of things) in the world!
The horror. Well, this is beside the point.
So, I'm stealing today's topic from my lit. class as well as science class. We're doing this small unit on fables, the cutesy tales of lessons and morales. Slow and steady wins the race, don't count your chickens before they hatched, all that fun stuff.
I remember when I was younger and heard or read fables. Let's take the popular "Ant and the Grasshopper" story. Hardworking ant, bum grasshopper. One gets to party all winter, and one freezes and dies. What little tykes are supposed to get from the story is "ohhhh, not doing is work is bad, I better do all the work I can now so I can play later".
And come on. We know the morales in those stories failed to really stick. Procrastination deserves its own health documentaries these days. All the little kids reading the story don't think about the morale. All they think is something around the lines of "haha, grasshopper, sucks to be you!".
But now, YA writers instead of fable writers (if they're even alive anymore, most of them are from centuries ago).
When teenagers transition into the stage they're in now, they are vulnerable to learning morales. The hard way or the easier way that we - yes, we - provide. There's reasons why bookish people tend to be the ones that avoid parties and drugs and craziness. That's because they already read enough tough, but good, books on these issues to avoid it. By having characters go through a mess of chaos, they have less desire to do it on their own. Unless they're sociopathic and like to pretend they are the character in whatever novel they're reading. That's a whole other story.
Not that all teenagers read (or even know how to these days, when it comes to my peers). They usually don't even read the required reading, or think about it. However, slowly YA and books is making its way into mainstream again so you never know....writers could very well affect the lives of young adolescents before they venture into the world themselves. And if the effect is positive, hooray.
In some ways, we are SUPERHEROES. Kinda. Okay. Maybe not.
Okay, enough mediocre philosophy today. Hope everyone is doing rather awesome (oh, and happy...Earth Day, I suppose) and hopefully talk to you next week!
I know right, I had this friend who parties all the time, and...I don't know, last I heard she had quit school. She was always telling me I was boring cuz I just wanted to read books and she wanted to party, lol. She was fourteen and she had never read a book in her life. So I read her Tom Sawyer, which she loved. Maybe she needs kid books.....getting off topic...
ReplyDeleteoh, yes, totally, save the world, plant a tree!!!! The woods are awesome!