Someone will call us Four Eyes

By Marc Robertson - Editor | August 17, 2023

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Marc Robertson

One of the great advantages of attending a small-town school is that you don’t have to make friends with a whole bunch of strangers every year.
I’ve often heard people talk about how nervous they felt when starting a new school year, especially over being in entirely new surroundings and in crowds of peers whom they didn’t know.
Honestly, that doesn’t make sense at all.
All the people in the classes that our younger generation are sitting in right now are the very same people with whom they attended Kindergarten, grade school, nearly every class they’ve been in since they were just old enough to put away the sippy cup.
Even those who are starting the new year on a different campus this month must surely find themselves among the same classmates from whom they bade an unnecessarily emotional farewell just two months ago, when the last school year ended.
Two months is a very long time indeed when you’re little. It can make the difference between having teeth and losing them, or not having any and growing new ones, and it can definitely make the difference between looking dorky in braces or a bad haircut and looking very mature and stylish… or between not having pimples and suddenly finding Krakatoa in the bathroom mirror.
All these things are Things That Matter to our children. All the Things That Matter are just the most important things of all. They have everything to do with whether one will be accepted by the new cliques, welcomed into the special circle, looked up to, even asked on a date… Things That Matter play a pivotal role in whether a school year will be successful.
And, frankly, I think that’s quite awful.
You know as well as I do that the Things That Matter to young children and adolescents actually don’t matter at all in the real world. We don’t go to university or into the workplace worried about gossip around the water cooler, afraid that someone will call us Four Eyes because we had to wear our glasses instead of contact lenses today, or that we’ll have nicknames based on bodily functions, haircut styles or choices in footwear…
But unfortunately the Things That Matter are of critical importance to the young, and nowhere is the pressure greater or the effect more profound than in social media.
It has become the playground of the bullies, the cowards and the abusers. It has simultaneously become the place where our children find and connect with their friends and the source of so much despair, so much self-loathing, and so much terrible hatred.
When the young ones say they’re nervous about starting the new year among strangers, they aren’t talking about new people in their classroom. They’re talking about new judgement, new gossip, new levels of a hierarchy that we adults have long forgotten how to fathom.
We learned at ages 16, 17 or 18 that the Things That Matter were actually rubbish, that we could be ourselves, develop our own identities, seek out the friends we wanted to befriend, engage in the pursuits that suited us. We shook off the dreadful mental shackles that had so overwhelmingly controlled and restricted us, and we chose to step away from the people who were hurtful to us.
In doing so, we chose to forget how much we had been wounded by the Things That Matter.
We need to work harder to remember how it felt to be a fledgling, whether in first or twelfth grade or anywhere in between. We need to think back on how we dealt with the Things That Matter and how, eventually, we refused to be controlled by them.
In his remarkable 1943 play “Les Mouches,” bravely written during the German occupation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre used the ancient Greek myth of Electra to describe a world in which peoples’ emotions, fears, behavior and interaction were controlled by forces both human and metaphysical whose very existence depended on their credibility. When shattered, exposed as mere shells, their power over the masses was dissolved, and the subjugated people were free to choose their own destiny.
There’s a lot more to Sartre than meets the eye, and there’s a lot to teach our young about stepping out from the shadow of fear and seizing the opportunities that lie behind the brittle shells of the Things That Don’t Matter.