The War on Cool

Have you ever had one of those moments when you read or heard something so personally profound that it forced a rare look at yourself in the mirror of complete honesty? And what you saw in the reflection scared the living shit out of you? I had such a moment not long ago.

It came innocently enough one Sunday morning. I had awoken late, as is my wont on weekends, and sauntered down the block to my local, independently owned coffee shop for a sickly-sweet flavored latte, an ‘everything’ bagel with cream cheese and the Sunday Washington Post. Most of my Sundays begin precisely this way, and there was no reason to think that I would be hit with an introspective 2x4 this chilly morning. But as I flipped open the Outlook section, generally my favorite after the sports section has been completely devoured, there it was. WHACK!

The title and subheading of the article immediately caught my eye: “Disappearing Act: Where Have All The Men Gone? No Place Good”. Being all man myself, I decided to find out where I had gone. The article, written by Michael Gurian (no, I’ve never heard of him either) started off by describing the phenomenon of how the numbers of females are overtaking males in college classrooms by an alarming rate – a trend with which I was familiar.

A few paragraphs later came the sentence that floored me: “… remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by.”

I must have read it three times before the conscious thought hit me: he’s talking about me.

Ok, not me specifically - although I did check the window to see if Gurian was peering in at me. I glanced guiltily at my Playstation 2 console and had a sudden urge to throw it out into the street.

Jesus, I thought to myself. How many years of my life have I thrown away, furiously tapping buttons named A and X in hopes of beating the level-seven boss monster or watching a video likeness of Joe Theismann throw his 12th TD pass to beat the Cowboys 84-7 in John Madden football (and feeling pissed about giving up the 7 points)? I then, reluctantly, calculated that in the last ten years alone I must have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 hours playing the game Civilization in all its various incarnations, and that doesn’t count the nearly 1,000 hours on Civ’s spin-off, Alpha Centauri.

But there are more than just countless hours of video gaming to explain why American boys are just not keeping up with their female counterparts. The cover story of the most recent issue of Newsweek is devoted to this topic (again with Michael Gurian as a major contributor), and they come up with all sorts of reasons to explain why boys are becoming disenfranchised. The most obvious reason seems to be that everything in today’s education system is geared towards empowering those who have traditionally been at the short end of the schooling stick, particularly girls. The youth of today has no reference point for this, but the fact is that the prevalence of girls in the classroom who are aiming for high-paying, high-powered careers is a fairly recent occurrence. Higher education was, for many years and most of America’s history, the almost exclusive domain of the white guy.

The civil rights movement of the 1960’s – which included bringing women’s rights to the forefront – was the first foray in what has been a precipitous tipping of the scales away from the dominance of white males. And why not? White men haven’t exactly endeared themselves to the rest of the cross section of the population, and in fact they seemed hell bent on keeping the rest of their brothers and sisters down, hogging the kings’ portion of the pie to themselves. Even most white guys couldn’t blame those who pushed for greater opportunities for women, and today many surely feel that this current trend of having so many boys wallow in under-education as the proper comeuppance of years of repression.

But of course, having a massive swath of the population slogging in ignorance is not good for America, and in typical American fashion, a war on this crisis will be certain to commence. And the first step in fighting a war is to determine who the enemy is, which in this case is not too different from the terrorists. The enemy is hard to define, can strike seemingly anywhere at anytime, and is spread out over a vast area. The blame has been positioned upon such varied antagonists – to name a few - as:

• Placing too much emphasis on placement test scores
• Brain Chemistry
• Having to sit still for too long
• Misguided feminism
• Boys who just don’t fit the classroom structure
• Improper diagnosis/drug prescription

Of all of these, the last is the one that frightens me the most. Instead of finding a way to maximize a child’s potential, let’s drug them into fitting a system that suppresses their very nature. I really hate agreeing with Tom Cruise on anything, but Americans are undoubtedly over-medicated, and diagnosing children with a disorder because they don’t fit into our one-size-fits-all education system is just sick. Pumping them full of drugs to force conformity seems criminally negligent to me. Kids are all pegs of various shapes and sizes that are being pummeled into the same round hole by way of the Ritalin highway, and for what? I have to believe that God or mother nature or natural selection or whatever you believe in makes people a certain way for a reason, and although major errors may occur from timer to time, minor personality differences are not cause to alter a person’s brain.

Of course, changing the education system to fit every individual’s needs is not realistic, so I propose a different method to help boys realize their full potential. I think the problem is not social programs or their reversal, not brain altering drugs, and certainly not feminists. The problem today is cool.

That’s right – we need a War on Cool. Cool is the biggest bane of our society’s existence.

Cool makes kids smoke when they reach 13; cool makes boys want to be hip-hop artists instead of chemists, even though they would like chemistry if their brain hadn’t been conditioned against it, and they have no rhyming skills whatsoever; cool makes our male youth rip bong hits while playing the latest cool game on their cool X-Box. And when they get older, cool makes men buy expensive clothing and pay outrageous cover charges and snort cocaine in bathroom stalls with other really cool men at the latest cool nightclub. Cool keeps men from getting married when women still want to marry them, and then turns them into obese 40-somethings with the word "loser" tattooed on their forehead. But most of all, cool keeps boys from exploring the myriad options available to them for fear that one of their friends might think they may commit the worst of all possible offenses – being uncool.

What young boys never seem to realize is that, more often than not, the cool guys in high school end up by not getting a college degree, working for a fraction of what their potential would allow, and becoming decidedly uncool because they live from paycheck to paycheck.

If you are a guy in high school reading this - imagine seeing that dorky kid who you used to beat up during recess in the future … you’re 32 now … it’s a fancy restaurant … he’s the customer with his hot wife around his arm … and you’re the waiter. How cool do you feel now, bitch? Don’t think that can happen to you? Think again. If you spend your time funneling every decision you make into what’s cool and what isn’t, something akin to the above scenario is bound to happen to you.

No one in that position ever stops to think that, one day, their future will be serving steak tartar and little drinks with umbrellas in them, or working at Jiffy Lube or moving piles of bricks from one place to another. They all assume that some form of Lady Luck is sure to strike and the five-bedroom house with two-car garage and the heart-shaped pool will be theirs. But those are pipe dreams, so put down the chronic.

Guys, embrace your inner dork. You’ll thank me later.

Evan Redmon is an assistant editor for a scientific journal. He has lived in Washington, DC for most of his life, with seven years of college down the drain in Madison, WI and four and a half years of doing nothing in particular in Boulder, CO. He has visited 39 of the 50 states in the Union (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and can be reached at evanredmon@yahoo.com.