The Cool Kids

Because of a few things I’ve observed over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking about “the cool kids.” Even when I was in high school a hundred years ago, there were cool kids. I wasn’t much aware of it at the time. I had my friends at school — some I knew from church, some lived in the same neighborhood, some were brothers or sisters of friends of my big brother.

In my senior year I volunteered to work on the school yearbook. One of my assignments toward the end was to go around to classrooms and ask people to vote on “Mr. & Miss CTHS.” (Those were the initials of our school.) There was some criteria, I believe, to help people pick someone to vote for, but it was basically going to be a popularity contest. Everyone was just fine with that.

Here’s the weird thing: I came in second in the voting. Had you asked me before for a list of possible “Mr.” winners, Lewis Greer would not have been on it. The fellow who won would have been, but not me.

It took me minutes, if not seconds, to figure out the only reason for my high finish was that I was right there in the room asking students to vote, and several of them obviously couldn’t think of anyone so they voted for the messenger.

What does that say about popularity? That almost no one thinks about other people all that much, is what it says to me. They think about the people right in front of them, and they think about their friends. Everyone lives primarily in their own world and isn’t much worried about other people’s worlds.

Personally I think that is good and healthy. No one has time to think about all those other worlds, especially if they are going to thrive in their own world.

Grabbing your attention

Of course there are a lot of people who want you to think about them. That was probably true in high school, but the cool kids I knew then weren’t trying to be cool kids. They were going to class, playing sports or in the band, or just hanging with their friends.

Who wants you to think about them? There may be more, but I’m going to list three groups: politicians, personalities, and prideful people. (Personalities includes media personalities, social media personalities, and professional personalities.)

The politicians are easy enough to identify. Beginning with presidents and prime ministers and ending with the lowest elected office you can think of, those people want you to think about them and vote for them. They’d also like for you to send them a dollar or two.

As for the “personalities,” they want you to follow them, especially those on social. They will not follow you back, but then they are personalities and you aren’t, so why would they? Besides, they may not even be reading, let alone writing, their own posts.

Until the age of the internet, we didn’t have easy ways to “measure” popularity. Now we have “followers” and “likes,” and “subscribers.” Movies always had box office numbers, music had gold records, and books had best seller lists, but cool kids only had admirers. Isn’t it great that we can now know without question who is admired the most?

You know I’m kidding, right?

Group 3

We know politicians want your vote and your money, and personalities want your loyalty and likes (which help them make money), but what about Group 3, the prideful people?

The good news is, unless they are also part of Group 1 or Group 2, the prideful people usually don’t want your money.

The bad news is, they want your soul.

I’m around a lot of college age people these days, and of all the people in the world who want their attention, the prideful people worry me the most. I want to say to my students and friends who are part of Gen Z — and even some Millennials — “It’s OK to want to hang with the cool kids, but the prideful people only look like cool kids. Inside they are ice, so their heart will never warm to you. Avoid them, or become ice yourself.”

Which reminds me of the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (part of The Chronicles of Narnia). She is most definitely evil, but when she learns that Edmund is a human child, she manipulates him with promises of power — and with Turkish Delight — and he falls for it.

What we (the readers) know about the White Witch is that she has made Narnia into a place where it is “always winter but never Christmas.” That is, in several ways, a chilling phrase.

And it is exactly what a prideful person will do to your relationship with them, no matter how much Turkish Delight and power they promise.

Seeing the trap and still being cool

How can any of us know someone belongs to Group 3? I have two young friends now who are under the spell of a modern day White Witch. Neither Witch is a female, but they are cold. They offer power in various forms and a kind of freedom that is really just an illusion, but my friends can’t see it.

How can I get them to see it? That will be a challenge, just as it was for Edmund’s brother and sisters to get him to see the spell he was under.

The best solution, of course, is to never fall for the trap in the first place. Ah, but that is difficult, and it is especially difficult if you have not yet had the life experience or gained the wisdom that helps you see the trap before it is sprung.

Just remember that when a relationship is primarily about one person and not both, trouble is close.

It’s fun to hang with the cool kids and even be one, but make sure none of the cool kids you are with are really the White Witch in modern costume.

Do good. It’s in you!