Many young boys in America first wonder who they are when they realize they won’t become a professional athlete. From the ages of 4-16, their thoughts are consumed with the idea of being the next Tom Brady, Sidney Crosby, or whoever they admire in baseball (I don’t watch it, and so I don’t have a fitting hero to insert—Arod?). Around 14 they begin to see who is naturally stronger, more athletic, and simply put, has more skills. If they can’t even compete with the guys on their own team, then how could they even hope to go to a D1 school, nevermind D3? All of a sudden, they ‘lose’ that foothold on reality, and realize, at the same time many changes occur in their body and mind, thanks to the rapid onset of puberty, that the longheld dreams they might have had for their future don’t just seem unlikely, but now impossible: the world becomes wide and large, all is potential and fear. This disillusionment plays out in many other cliques and verticals too: band kids who can’t hack it in the classical scene, and know there is no other avenue of success for moderately adequate flute players (flutists); theater kids who can’t even land the leading role in a small town HS production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream; skateboarders whose hardflips and tre flips aren’t quite snazzy enough to land minor sponsorships from Plan B or Nike; for every possible realm of creative or athletic endeavor, for every one kid who breaks into a budding greatness, there are hundreds of thousands of kids just flailing slowly behind his coattails, not even close enough to grab onto them.
At this point, around 16-17, college becomes the next big thing: that net which lovingly hugs mediocrities with tender arms of long-term debt obligations. Your SAT or ACT score become your very own mission for the holy grail for a few months to a year spent in study: a few questions answered wrongly is the margin between Vanderbilt and Rutgers, to say nothing of the almost-pointless college experiences that occur at LSU, Alabama, and ASU; and to say especially nothing of those endless stretches of non-flagship state schools in small towns, which are hotbeds for drop-outs, junkies, philanderers, and prostitutes, which, at their very best, are production sites for $40-60k 9-5s that one does their time in for 40 years, or until some lung or kidney cancer takes you out just five years short of your retirement. At 16-17, you consider the whole stretch of your life through this very narrow margin of right answers versus wrong answers on just one test, and you buttress it with extracurriculars, which you have long given up any hope of going ‘pro’ in, as well as charity stints at Feed My Starving Children or some other project you can put on your college applications to give the appearance of a ‘well-rounded model citizen’ that the University might consider a wise investment. Like a cattle, you are corralled by electric fences of fear and angst and worry, into a narrow slit of property and achievement, so as to not save you from that dreaded nothingness, that state-of-being-a-pariah: a good for nothing.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Good Propaganda to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.