[Excerpts from] The Life of an American Boy at 17

Ryan Morgan is a high school senior from West Bend, Wisconsin. Like all seventeen-year-olds, he thinks a lot about what he wants to do with his life, because everyone keeps telling him he’s supposed to have it figured out. He’d rather just talk about his girlfriend or cool sneakers or the Packers. But life is never that simple.

Part One in a Series on Growing Up in America Today, from the March issue of Esquire

Ryan Morgan is seventeen and happy to be a guy. To be a girl would mean he’d have to deal with a lot more drama. He’d likely have to deal with mean girls. And he could end up a mom, which he doesn’t ever want, because being a mom is hard. Probably the hardest job in the world. Also, he might not think football was as interesting. He isn’t sure what would be interesting, but if it isn’t football, then he isn’t interested. Other than that, he doesn’t think there are too many reasons it would be better to be a guy than a girl—unless you’re from the Middle East or maybe the inner city. 

[OCS: What 17-year-old guy thinks like this, much less expresses it in these terms?]

But there’s this thing that still bothers him. It has to do with an incident last year in the computer lab. It was a Friday, near the end of the period, and Ryan waited by the exit. He began absentmindedly opening and shutting the door. This girl he didn’t really know told him to stop. When he did it again, she smacked him in the face. He smacked her back. She clawed at him, and he fell into a row of computers. The bell rang, and the girl ran off. “The teacher asked me to report it right away,” he tells me, “but I had a bus to catch.”

He took photos of his face and went to the principal’s office first thing on Monday, like his mom told him to. “He was so upset,” the assistant principal tells me. “He didn’t know why he was in trouble.” Ryan spent a couple hours in the in-school suspension room. He got a ticket referring him to the municipal court, where he appeared in August. He pleaded not guilty. At a second meeting, Ryan spoke to a prosecutor. At least, “I think it was a prosecutor,” he says. “I think he felt like it was stupid that I got a ticket for this. The look on his face was kind of like, What the heck is this?” Ryan thinks that if he were a girl, he wouldn’t have been punished. “As long as I don’t get in trouble again for a year, I’m okay,” he tells me. “But I had to deal with it for a few months.” The kids in school, “they called me a woman beater. I don’t think anyone actually thought I was. They were just giving me crap. It was just a stressful time.” 

[OCS: How convenient, this particular teenager runs into a “gender” abuse situation and is immediately referred to the authorities. One might ask, was the girl also charged with assault and punished accordingly?] 

West Bend is a blue-collar town with a strong German heritage in a county where Donald Trump won 67 percent of the vote. “If you’re a moderate Republican in West Bend, you’re a liberal,” Joe Carlson, a former school-board president, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2011. It’s also overwhelmingly white. Trump held a campaign rally at its conference center in 2016, where he declared, “I’m asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today,” even though only 2 percent of West Bend’s population is African-American. (Whites account for 95 percent.) Milwaukee is thirty miles south, close enough that West Bend is considered an outer suburb but still far enough that not many people consider commuting an option. The counties around Milwaukee are some of the few suburban places in America to remain firmly red. 

[OCS: Aha! Now I know it is a political hit piece and the author has turned a story of an American teenager into a platform for her political musings.] 

After school, Ryan usually goes home. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. “Parties are stupid,” he says, “because it’s where guys get drunk and talk about threesomes. It’s lame.” He isn’t part of any social clique—not the football guys, the volleyball girls, the Pokémon players, the anime lovers, the choir kids, the guys who work on cars, and definitely not the “white guys who all hang out with their trucks and guns and say, ‘Heil Trump’ and all that.” Ryan tried playing sports, but he didn’t like any of them. He just doesn’t care about being popular. “I’m really happy with who I am,” he says. 

[OCS: Now I am getting suspicious. Teenagers with trucks and guns saying “Heil Trump?” Perhaps by the end of the story the author will convince the boy he really is a girl trapped in a boy’s body and seriously needs to think about the transgender agenda?] 

We talk about how he’s become more interested in politics in the past couple years. Then I ask about why he thinks the altercation with the girl happened last year. He’s still unsure: “The whole situation was crazy. She probably didn’t like that I opened the door.” He says he wasn’t trying to provoke her. “I didn’t process that she was mad at me, and I opened the door again. She hit me. I hit her back because I didn’t know how to react.”

[OCS: I find it interesting that she starts with his interest in politics and morphs to the incident where he hit a girl and then claims “I didn’t know how to react.” Funny, I thought all of the progressives were about gender equality – where the rules apply to all three sexes (male, female, and indeterminate on Tuesday) Perhaps he was just respecting her equal rights when he returned the physical aggression. What is strange is that the author describes this teenager as being 6’5” – and what girl is going to start a physical altercation with someone of that size and be able to do that much damage. The normal reaction would have been to grab her hands to stop the attack – not hit back.]   

The fight with the girl was just one of a long string of recent events, most of them politically tinged, that have shaken Ryan’s sense of self. “Last year was really bad,” he says. “I couldn’t say anything without pissing someone off.” He says it started around the time of the presidential election—the liberal students became enraged and the conservative students emboldened. “Lots of drama over politics,” he says. “It ruined friendships and changed social groups. People were making friends based on their politics more than anything.” Kids started advertising their beliefs by hanging flags and posters on their lockers. They wore T-shirts that promoted Hillary for president, or Trump for president, or LGBT rights, or feminism, or Black Lives Matter. The most popular opinion at West Bend seemed to be anti-Trump. Ryan, raised in Republican households, was surprised by the vitriol. “Everyone hates me because I support Trump?” he says. “I couldn’t debate anyone without being shut down and called names. Like, what did I do wrong?”

[OCS: I almost stopped reading here because I was disgusted with the characterization of this poor schmuck who appears to have been played by the author with a progressive agenda in mind. How many 17-year-old boys think and sound like this? And, it gets worse…]

This past year, Ryan ran another gantlet: social media. He does not use Facebook or Twitter, which he thinks are mostly for older people. And he has no interest in Snapchat. But he, like most everyone his age, uses Instagram. “I’d post a comment,” he recalls, “and the replies would all be the same thing: ‘You’re stupid and that’s dumb’ or ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re straight, you can’t talk about something LGBT.’ ” One time, on a post he describes as “a feminist thing that said something about what men do,” he commented, “It’s not true, and that’s really stupid to say that.” The woman who’d posted it responded with something like, “What do you have to say? You’re a white man.” Ryan is still confused by her response. “Doesn’t she promote equal rights?” he says. “What if I posted the same kind of thing but about what women do? Like, if I posted a photo of a feminist march? But wait, feminist people hate when white men talk about stuff like that. That would be the end of me.” He pauses. “I guess they think since I’m not a girl, I don’t have an opinion.”

As Ryan grappled with progressive ideas on social media, he noticed that others did, too. Last summer, James Gunn, the director of Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy, was sacked for a bunch of tweets he wrote several years ago. “He was fired because he said a shower in a hotel felt like a little kid peeing on him,” Ryan’s friend Andrew says. “Totally stupid and not worth the attention,” says Ryan. “Some jokes are pretty bad. But it depends on the context. If you’re honestly kidding, people shouldn’t get offended. 

[OCS: Of course, if you are not a progressive and playing identity politics then shut up appears to be the real message being conveyed to today’s youth. Isolating them, exploiting their squishiness on progressive topics, and molding them into social justice warriors. Now, I did stop. This is crazy and not worth my time.]