It’s four-twenty today. Ha ha ha, hee hee hee. It’s the day you get to see posts about how cool smoking weed is, how people have smoked weed, how weed is going to be smoked, and that we should leave out cookies and milk for Snoop Dogg. Hilarious, I know.
But it gets tiresome in school. For one, my students feel it almost necessary to speak loudly enough about their pot-smoking exploits. Especially today. You’ll hear it before first period–“Oh, everyone is late because they’re getting high.” Not necessarily. They could just be late, like every day. If someone is absent, it is assumed they are staying home to get high. Doubtful.
Everyone is an expert on drugs now because cable television has shows about it. There’s movies about it. I doubt the number of kids you think are on drugs at any high school campus is anywhere close to the actual number. It’s way LESS. Yep. Less.
It takes effort and money to get high. And, yes, some kids are turnt, lit, faded–but you would be surprised at how many kids have never even been offered something. That’s the movies and other generations.
Four-twenty is also Hitler’s birthday. It is “too soon” for anything Hitler-related. Nothing about him is funny. Sean Spicer referencing him is not amusing, nor is the SNL bits about him. Done.
Four-twenty is also the 18th anniversary of the school shootings at Columbine. Once a huge deal, it is mentioned here and there in the news. Most of my students probably don’t know much about it, except that some kids died in a school shooting a long time ago.
But with students being bombarded with constant media, Columbine becomes something less. They get to see shootings every day. Two days ago, in our own district, kids had to be evacuated from an elementary school because of a bomb threat. My students weren’t pleased, as they had hoped for a district-wide evacuation.
Man, it was a big deal in 1999, though. I was teaching in Orange County, out in portable classrooms, and district folk were crawling under everything they could to see if bombs were under our rooms. The next year at North High, someone wrote “420–More Will Die” on a wall, which prompted fear for weeks, and half our school taking the day off because they wanted to be safe. I know, some took the day off to get high, but many claimed, flat-out, it was not worth the risk to come.
Think of what’s happened in the last 18 years with all the school violence that’s been posted on the Internet and shown on television. You can’t go a few days without something happening. Because unlike the myth that everyone at school is high, the reality of violence is easily tracked. If you don’t believe THIS, a simple Internet search will turn up something similar.
Leaving cookies out for Snoop is an easier reality.