Late my Senior year of high school, the school ushered everyone into the gymnaisum to watch a motivational video — I guess you can call it that?  I was privy to parts of the planning, which is that I overheard the decision to see how this video went over at a neighboring town, and the decision to play it for us.  The theory was that this film would forcus us all, a drifting and directionless student population, to confront our stark reality and begin to make choices in our life.

It had a production style that I’m sure would date badly — still frames of intervals of some seconds’ worth of time.  They played out some scenario or other through the lyrics of popular songs — the one I remember most integral is this song, Fastball’s “The Way“.  Along with the Wallflowers’s less than stellar cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.  I’m pretty sure something from Foo Fighters.  Mind you, it’s bizarre that I can even recall this thing.

The story was mostly framed around “The Way”.  A song about Aimless Youth.  I didn’t quite identify with the scenario put forward.  A teenage girl going out on a day trip to the beach with her friends one sunny day.  Just going to hang out, as the case was.  The father watches flat-footed as she grabs his credit card for this under-taking, worried expression, and also helpless to the days’ wandering events.  Car runs out of gas on the way home from a lazy day at the beach — lyrics displayed between freeze shots.

I suppose that particular scenario may be less likely now, what with our “Greatest Fiscal Crisis since the Great Depression, but nowhere near as dire” credit crunch.  The father would snap the credit card out of the daughter’s hand, right?  Also gone today are the descriptions of “today’s youth” in the news magazines in the years 1998 through 2000 as dripping with consumer branded logos and having particularly “fat allowances” (these stories having a subtext, if not text, for what was wrong with our children of that their culture could incubate mass killers.  Those always made for a depressing read.  Today’s Moral Panic Stories have a less glummy feeling to them.)

But however you can slice the adolescent aimless and directionless of the crowd, I was hard pressed to see this “ripping of the credit card out of father’s hand” as part and parcel to my particular low-income economically stagnant town.  The song they really needed to frame a situation around might have been The Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright” — though, that might have been too blunt and edgy.

The teacher for my class following this assembly bemoaned the students’ bad behavior.  The ASB gummint instructor teacher bizarrely held the opposite view of how the students reacted.  I was sitting next to that teacher, and I wasn’t sure what he was seeing — wishful thinking on his part, I presume — I side with the other teacher.  Maybe they picked the wrong pop song.  Or the premise was wrong in subtle ways.  Or, maybe the students were too aimless and wandering.

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