The Teen Reporter

Would you let your teen have a credit card?

Nearly one third of high school seniors say they have a credit card. Is this a path to financial literacy or destruction? The teens at Mercy Housing Wentworth's digital connectors program made this great video, showing the challenges of giving teens credit cards and outlining the consequences. Take a look:

 

Race: it's a joke!

  When we you think of Race, what are the first thoughts that come to your mind? Some might say a competition in which two or more persons compete to see who can reach a finish line first (like my friend Noe might jokingly say).

Others, about 97.9% of the human population might think of the separation of human skin tones or backgrounds into smaller categories to identify a large group. This separation of skin tones has caused many ignorant disasters and genocides throughout the years.

Race even affects the entertainment industry, something we see a lot today - even cartoons like Family Guy and the Cleveland show to Disney’s Phineas and Ferb.  This reporter believes that the media plays a major role on how negatively teens view each other and other cultures.

One of my favorite musicals of all time is called Avenue Q. The show is set in New York City about a guy named Princeton just finishing getting his degree, venturing out into the cruel and unforgiving world. He meets a group of very different people that live in a little community called Avenue Q. One of the major songs in the musical is called “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”. I’m telling you, this is arguably one of the funniest songs on a Broadway play ever, but it also got me to thinking. One of the lines of the song is “You should be much more careful when you're talking about the sensitive subject of race.”

Careful? Really? History has never had a thought about being sensitive or thoughtful for those who were kidnapped and chained against their will to be forced to work as slave;  not only Africans, but also ingenious people of the islands of the Caribbean. Once physical slavery was outlawed in 1865, mental slavery gave way to our current situation as of 2011: racist and prejudice thoughts that affect people of all ages.

Media shows us these prejudice thoughts through songs and cartoons. Think about it? Have you ever heard the stereotype that all Asian kids are super geniuses? What about that all black folks have chicken and Kool-Aid every night for dinner? Oh, and here’s my favorite one: All people that speak Spanish are automatically Mexican! Ha! These may seem like dumb stereotypes, but they affect how we view each other.

The more we can get to know and understand different cultures, the better our lives would truly be. Race doesn’t have to be a divider. It could be a connector - a way to embrace the fact that we all aren’t the same skin tone but we all have a story. Once we, as people, are able to listen to one another, the better this world could be. The world isn’t just viewed in black and white, right and wrong; it has areas of gray that can be used to understand others and make all our lives easier.

*United We Stand, but Divided We Fall.*

Love: Fantasy of The Heartbroken

“Love is like a rubber-band: we keep pulling; one person lets go; and the person that held on gets hurt.”

-Anonymous

Have you ever been heartbroken? Loved? I have. Lying is one of the most common ways to end up being heartbroken. I know this because I’ve lied before, and it resulted in a breakup. Not many people can admit they have lied, but they sure can tell you that someone is lying or that something is a lie. Those who don’t know what it feels to be loved or heartbroken are lucky. They are lucky because they don’t have to suffer from love.

Love is a mysterious thing that cannot be explained, and we adore it. This emotion is what makes us more than unique, but its counterpart, pain, is an inevitable result of mistreating it.Ironically, pain can also bring love. Sometimes people that have been hurt hurry to recovery, and like a fairy tale, they find their love and live happily ever after. That's an optimistic point of view, but in reality, heartbreak can't easily be healed. My best friend was a victim of a broken heart. He wrote this: “What was a heart, burned; what was love, gone; kindness is taking a serious weakness… guess it’s time for me to grow up.” I was astonished to hear such a thing coming out of him; I never thought he would care about such a thing as love.

I've concluded something about love: it’s a fantasy made by pain. Pain exists in every living thing, whether it walks, crawls, swims or flies. We use pain to understand what is going around us. Without pain, we would more or less be dead. Think about it. Pain helps us understand that something is too hot or too cold for us. We react to pain to prosper.

So why do we love love and hate pain? Like love, that's a mystery.

Photo credit: Roland Tanglao

Being a Teen Really Isn't That Easy

Adults like to remember their teen years as easy, fun and stress-free. But is that really true? Do most adults really remember what it's like to try to figure out school, home, work, friends and love for the first time? While it's easy for us grown-ups to idealize, the teens at Mercy Housing Lakefront have created this PSA about what teens really go through and what they need to get by.

 

The Sad Truth: Has dropping out REALLY become normal?

    As a child, I was continuously taught that material objects do not matter. That anyone can rob you of your luxuries at any given moment; that treasuring something that has no soul makes you as empty as your morals. But in that same breath, my  dad would always say that education is the one thing no one can take away from you. Knowledge and wisdom are things that should have more value than any other possession (other than family, of course).

    Lately, however, the morals that my dad impressed upon me aren’t as prevalent in today’s society. The Chicago Public School (CPS) system has been falling into a depressive downwards spiral. The CPS graduation rate is only 56%; this means that just slightly more than one out of every two CPS students will graduate for high school.