Back in middle school, soon after getting our first phones, we preteens learned the rules of group chats. If someone isn’t added or invited, you need to keep them from finding out about the chat at all costs. Don’t put sensitive information - for example, the names of your crushes…or the dates and locations of birthday parties - in writing because they can always be screen-shotted.
And most importantly, don’t add anyone to the chat who you don’t want to read what’s being written. Growing up in the age of the internet, we learned these rules in the same way that a toddler discovers that falling down is painful.
But admittedly, these lessons take a while to sink in. Now 17, my classmates and I are constantly in uncomfortable group chat situations. Just the other day, my friend posted a screenshot on her private story.
It was discussing a possible spring break trip with two of my closest friends. My first thought was, wow, that looks so fun. My second thought was, why am I not on this group chat? In that story, I saw texts that I wasn’t supposed to see; it was, if you will, classified information.
The fallout from our mistakes can range from minimal to damning. When I was excluded from the spring break group chat, I felt hurt, but I didn’t make a big fuss about it. But it wasn’t the first time this has happened to me or someone else at our school.
A few months prior, a friend of mine was planning her birthday, and accidentally included one too many on her group chat. She gave the date, the restaurant, and the dress code, only to realize that she’d had added someone who was not invited. That’s a trickier situation to get out of. The obvious solution for the teenage brain: Lying, of course - even if it means denying the written word. (Thankfully, no one’s ever called it into the school paper…yet.)
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There’s a reason teenagers aren’t allowed to run for president. It’s because our brains are not fully developed. We do dumb things routinely: We accidentally add people to group chats; we put things in writing that we shouldn't; and we traffic in snide remarks.
We could never handle classified information: We’d gossip about it, just for starters. But by age 35 (the Constitutional minimum cut-off for becoming president), people outgrow that sort of behavior - and have learned their lessons. Well, not so fast…
As I recently discovered, I was silly to believe that these are solely the problems of adolescents. Lately, the headlines look far too familiar. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, played a role that everyone my age has played, at least once: The kid accidentally invited to the birthday party…or a boy mistakenly put on a history group chat. I would never have thought that the people guarding, protecting, and deciding on the most important of American secrets could be as careless as the seventeen-year-olds who surround me.
But lately I’ve been feeling like there are a lot of parallels between my high school hallways and the Capitol’s corridors. Take bullying, which is big in school, whether it be the mean remarks and online posts of high school, or the out-and-out physical confrontations of 7th and 8th grade. On their war plan group chat, our American officials were nothing short of foul to our allies across the sea.
When something like that happens in my classroom - for example, screenshots of nasty text messages being leaked - it results in an uncomfortable silence and often the end of a friendship. The sort of snark that’s so common in adolescent years is cruelty for the sake of being cruel. But what happens when that exact situation plays out on the world stage?
I can almost guarantee, on a human level, that feelings are still hurt. As for international relations, they seem to be eroding the same way adolescent friendships do.
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Our Washington bullies don’t just talk behind backs either. I watched all 139 minutes of the President’s meeting with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and putting aside the implications for NATO and democracy itself, the spectacle was nothing I hadn’t seen before. That sort of situation played out every day in middle school: A group of kids band together with the express, collective purpose of taunting a weaker individual - to please themselves as well as the growing cafeteria crowd (why else televise it nationally?), not to mention to get the approval of an even bigger bully who might just be watching from afar. I know what maturity looks like, and I know what civility looks like, but I didn’t see either one that day.
My friends don’t discuss politics that often, but it’s hard not to, when the headlines are so laughable (if you’re into gallows humor) - because it feels like our elected officials are doing a parody of us. When the laughter dies, we are left with a chilling reality. Among my peers, I get the feeling that there may be something of a gender divide.
On the one hand, my girlfriends are worried. They don’t like what they see going on in the news; they recognize the familiar pettiness and cattiness behind the mean tweets, and they reject what they perceive as a lack of humanity in the administration’s attitude towards immigration and transgender rights.
But they seem largely to be successful at compartmentalizing their upset, not talking too much about it, and when they do, trying to find humor in the darkness. One of my female friends, who is Ukrainian herself, re-posted a cartoon depicting the Zelenskyy White House meeting, where everyone was wearing clown noses except the Ukrainian president, and the caption read, “Why aren’t you wearing one?”
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And then there are the boys; they worry me more. They seem to find “strong man” role models in Trump and Elon Musk, mistaking their brashness and bluntness for confidence and power. There’s almost an unspoken permission now for boys to be boys. One guy I know routinely posts MAGA salutations, apparently reaping sheer delight from the provocation; and another guy similarly embraces the Trump party line on many issues if only as a new means of being rebellious, pointedly rejecting the more liberal tenets of his schooling.
The other day, I heard my dad playing an old Rolling Stones song with the line, “What a drag it is getting old.” But these days, the biggest drag is being young. We young people are in the paradoxical position of having none of the power - yet bearing all of the onus of the future being ruined by our elders. In our high school group chats, the worst we can do is exclude people and hurt feelings.
But our elected officials use their group chats to gamble with our futures and all American lives. If behavior like that is acceptable, we might as well fill their seats ourselves. The people who we are supposed to respect, the people who we - at 17 - don’t even get to elect, have a maturity problem: They act like they’re my age, in the worst ways.
And the messes they create, spiraling from such poor behavior, are the ones we will have to clean up, if that’s even possible. So, let me be as direct as I can be in speaking truth to power: It’s time to grow up.
