Welcome to Dystopia

Welcome to Dystopia

I made this video because I’m sick of the narrative.

In the United States, the media portrays that we believe teenagers are incapable. They are a sub-human species guided by whims, under the influence of violent video games, and likely to drop their pants to take a selfie of their genitals at any moment. Teenagers are the butt of the joke. They hate their families. They take advice from rap music. And, more than anything, you can’t trust them.

That is until a teenager does something extraordinary. Then the media flips. They they are hyper-capable superhumans. They climb Mount Everest. They sail around the world. They raise millions. They launch a political revolution. They win a fistful of gold medals in the Olympics.

I made this video for two reasons:

1. Teenagers are fully human. They are not superhuman, they are not sub-human. They are just regular old humans.
2. The Dystopian Narrative is not new. Parents freak out about social media apps the same way their parents freaked out about cell phones or having a TV in your room or playing video games, the same way their grandparents freaked out about them talking on the telephone or listening to Rock-n-Roll. It’s the same exact narrative with a new object of scorn.

As a youth worker and as a parent, it saddens me that we live in a society that allows our young to be portrayed this way.

While I live in Dystopia, as a parent and youth worker, I long for something better and more whole.

I’m sick of it.

It’s time to call it out for what it is – A narrative designed to destroy perceptions of our children.

I’m sick of it.

It reveals the depravity of ourselves more than the depravity of our young.