THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 23, 1997 TAG: 9701230006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PATRICK LACKEY
LENGTH: 79 lines
At Hampton Roads high schools, a school bus isn't a school bus. It's ``the cheese.'' To ride ``the cheese'' is to lose status with peers. Better to own a car or ride with a friend who has one.
At some high schools in the region, having a car is not enough. It has to be a nice car. (My 1990 fading-red Toyota Tercel hatchback would be sneered at.) Naturally the nice car has to be insured, and rates for teen-agers are horrendous. A teen-agers' clothes should have brand names, and girls should even wear brand-name makup[sic].
All in all, ``fitting in'' is expensive for teen-agers.
To pull it off, many teen-agers work. Supposedly one in four Virginians ages 16 to 19 is working 35 hours or more each week, on top of stopping by the local high school to learn a little. (The only restriction for Virginia workers 16 to 19 is that the jobs not be hazardous. They can't high-dive into tiny tanks at carnivals.)
In Sunday's Pilot, staff writer Lorraine Eaton told the story of Hampton Roads teen-agers hard at work. The story struck me as sad.
Work is what they'll do eight or more hours a day for most of their adult lives. If they were going to have to eat peas most days of their adult lives, would they want to start eating peas at age 16, or even younger?
Jim Yano, a friend who teaches English at Cox High School, advises students, ``As long as you're in school, that's your job.'' He might as well tell them to dress entirely in turquoise, seven days a week. The allure of the dollar, the desire for a car and fashionable clothes almost compel his students to work. The ones with weeknight jobs, he said, are wasted during the day.
At age 43, Yano's not that old. But growing up in Honolulu, he had only one friend who worked. The compulsion to work in order to consume had not yet taken root there.
I'm 53. Out in little Kansas towns where I attended school, farm kids had chores. Most of us town kids had summer jobs, and some kids had Saturday jobs during the school year. But none of my friends worked after school, except for farm chores.
We students didn't need cars to escape our parents. We could just walk somewhere. In Belleville, Kan., population 3,000, any town kid could walk to the downtown drugstore to see what was happening. Our parents never went anywhere on weekend nights, so we could borrow their cars for dates. We didn't need trendy clothes to impress each other, because our eyes and ears were not continually assaulted by ads and commercials for trendy clothes. We were blissfully ignorant of trends.
But one generation's luxuries become the next generation's absolute necessities.
Cars are easily the No. 1 reason students give for working. Cool clothes are second.
Status among peers and freedom to roam - a teen-ager can't have them without the right threads and wheels. Or at least kids don't think they can.
Better public transportation might help a little. But if kids don't want to take ``the cheese,'' they won't take a city bus. They want to travel whenever and wherever they choose. They want to live as though they were older than they are.
And they're willing to pay the price in lost sleep and lost learning and even lost youth. They don't realize how long they'll be old and how short they'll be young.
They think that wasting their youth to acquire things is their idea. It isn't. It's an idea that is sold to them and that they accept.
Nike says, ``Just do it.'' Well, you don't need Nikes to just do it, whatever ``it'' is.
I hesitate to give advice to teen-agers, having failed, myself, at being one, 30 years ago. Being a teen-ager is comparable in difficulty to bench-pressing the Empire State Building.
OK, I hesitated. Now here's my advice to teen-agers: Take back your youth. Rebel against everything that drives you to sacrifice grades and leisure time and sleep and maybe even your future. After all, bad grades might keep you from higher education and thus from a good job down the road.
For now, ride ``the cheese'' with pride.
A Manteo, N.C., high school senior said working kept her from all but one home football game in four years. There won't be another football season, not while she's in school. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.