There was a girl in my eldest's HS class that used to wear a Slytherin uniform (sometimes complete with cape!) quite frequently to school. She was considered a bit of an odd duck at the time, but I believe she grew out of it (the Harry Potter getup for daily wear, perhaps not the eccentricity). It didn't help that the new rule for society was, even then, to not point out that perhaps such public display of...oddness...was perhaps a bit unseemly (this has become a problem imho -- we all have to learn that there are times when we shouldn't let our little proverbial freak flags fly so glaringly). Social media has done away with that ability to discern.
I'm still not sure I'd want her voting, even now 15 years later.
Individuality has been warped into "try way too hard to stick out in a crowd". The grand irony being that if there were a literal crowd of people like that they'd all love it. Nobody really wants to stand out for its own sake.
Trying too hard to stick out is one of the hallmarks of our teenage years when we are all rather clumsy and grasping in our own awkward ways figuring out how to go from child to adult. So, while having patience with Ms. Slytherin was in order, a certain kindly firmness should have also been applied at the very least by her parents (though some of us teaching staff did try to broach the topic of it, gently...kind of hard to do when the home front is allowing her to go to school like that, and for the record she wasn't a bad kid, just weird fixation on Harry Potter...although we had WH staffers calling themselves Dumbledore's Army, so at least she didn't do that).
Idiocracy is not just a movie.
What fucking drugs are these kids on these days? And vying for social media clout isn't helping them.
Antidepressants, hormone therapy and zombifying ADHD "treatment".
They also eat tide pods and do blackout challenges and shit so...
Social media will inevitably end up being the downfall of western civilization.
Until of course they are required to tell their users that they are toxic to their overall mental heath. I mean cigarettes come with a warning right?
There was a girl in my eldest's HS class that used to wear a Slytherin uniform (sometimes complete with cape!) quite frequently to school. She was considered a bit of an odd duck at the time, but I believe she grew out of it (the Harry Potter getup for daily wear, perhaps not the eccentricity). It didn't help that the new rule for society was, even then, to not point out that perhaps such public display of...oddness...was perhaps a bit unseemly (this has become a problem imho -- we all have to learn that there are times when we shouldn't let our little proverbial freak flags fly so glaringly). Social media has done away with that ability to discern.
I'm still not sure I'd want her voting, even now 15 years later.
Individuality has been warped into "try way too hard to stick out in a crowd". The grand irony being that if there were a literal crowd of people like that they'd all love it. Nobody really wants to stand out for its own sake.
Trying too hard to stick out is one of the hallmarks of our teenage years when we are all rather clumsy and grasping in our own awkward ways figuring out how to go from child to adult. So, while having patience with Ms. Slytherin was in order, a certain kindly firmness should have also been applied at the very least by her parents (though some of us teaching staff did try to broach the topic of it, gently...kind of hard to do when the home front is allowing her to go to school like that, and for the record she wasn't a bad kid, just weird fixation on Harry Potter...although we had WH staffers calling themselves Dumbledore's Army, so at least she didn't do that).
This is why I laugh whenever someone says "reading makes you smarter". Cargo cultists, all of them.