Kontextmaschine

24th August 2022

Post reblogged from Mike Barthel's Tumblr with 34 notes

You only hear about someone being captain of their soccer team or class president or homecoming queen when they are a teenager and something awful has happened to them. She was president of the model UN, and now she is missing; he had spent a semester abroad, and now he is dead. In an effort to understand who they are, like a college admissions committee, we turn to their resumé. We do this in part because teenagers are fundamentally uninteresting, and listing their achievements is more compelling than saying that they were often hungry and slept a great deal. But it’s also done, it seems to me, in an effort to vouchsafe their sanctity in a secular age. Teen tragedies are more tragic than other tragedies because they occasion the death of an innocent, and the more innocent, the more tragic. Maybe in the past we could have talked about their chastity, their good works, the time they spent in church, or their good fortune. Such things now seem less meaningful, or uncouth, though there’s still the implication that the longer a teen’s resumé, the less free time they’ve had to be naughty. So now we turn to their achievements as evidence of their purity and worth. Being captain of the soccer team isn’t necessarily evidence that you’re going to do any more in life than anyone else, but we tell teens it is - just add one more line to your resumé and you’ll get into the right college and get the right job! - so we need to continue the charade in telling teens about the death of one of their own.

Tagged: rerun (the original reblog is from that period where tumblr shortened long post reblogs as links)