Getting Through Eighth grade, And Life, Somehow

A NEW MOVIE called "Eighth Grade" has a cool soundbite. Daddy and daughter are in the car. The conversation: "can't you at least look at me!"..... "And not look at the road?"...... "OK, obviously I didn't mean that. Go ahead and look at the road. But just don't be quiet and weird while you do it."......"um, sorry"...(editor's note:can we say "hormones?")......When you're in eighth grade, you're thirteen years old, your body is changing in ways you can't act on, your behavior is entirely controlled y surging, complicated new chemicals, and you are becoming uncontrollably concerned with things such as social status, self image, and all associated forms of mental instability universal to early teens. This includes everybody. Every minor event is a major catastrophe. The advice "just relax and enjoy life" is like being advised to change your gait while walking on the moon. I taught eighth grade for one year, during which my hair turned white, then fell out, and my doctor put me on blood pressure meds. For me the stress was nearly as bad as it was for my students. I was soon able to retire, they weren't. And yet, somehow, they survived to enter ninth grade, and even more miraculously, they lived long enough to enter adulthood here in the United States of Anxiety. But by God, while in my class, they learned..something. The summer before I entered eighth grade, the summer of sixty eight, RFK was murdered, race riots burned American cities to the ground, and I figured out that the Viet Nam war was a complete scam. That fall, I got so tired of listening to Hubert Horatio Humphrey insult Nixon, that notwithstanding the fact his insults were actually statements of verifiable fact, I rooted for Nixon to win. All that, plus the cute girls, and the daily struggle to forge ahead into the company of cool kids and placate the bullies by befriending them, as an unrepentant intellectual nerd without the slightest idea how to dress properly, which at that time meant, how to wear plaid bell bottom pants and six inch wide belts with big silver buckles.. I had it tough, but at least I didn't have to deal with Instagram, Twitter Tweet, or Donald Trump, which is quite enough for even the most seasoned veteran of societal navigation. Like then, today's eighth graders live in the best of times, and....well, you know the rest. So, welcome to the club. The secret handshake will be shown later. Newspapers are written on an eighth grade level, and online we all behave like eighth graders, at best. We are, all of us, far less able to control our behavior and the circumstances of our lives than we might wish to believe. These various influences, internally and externally, are our masters, our determinants. Like a great philosopher once said: "We can get what we want, but we cannot will what we want." There was a time in America when suicidal, schizophrenic, or just plain depressed people were considered morally deficient, and told to "just snap out of it." Today, we do a bit better, but perhaps not much better. Today, ten percent of American's are diabetic. At least we don't tell them to "snap out of it."