“Boom!” Laura’s stack of freshly checked-out books cry out as they land on the glossy tiled floor of her school’s hallway. Her glasses flew off as she fell to the ground, but she still had an idea of who her assaulter was; the most popular girl in school. She has stuck out her “perfect” little black Jimmy Choo stiletto right in poor Laura’s path. Now she is the laughing stock of the hallway. Her eyes rake the crowd, but there is not one friendly face to turn to. She scrambles to collect all her books to hurry off to her class before the bell rings. When she’s safely inside the doors of her science class, she realizes she is one book short. Her stomach sinks a little, knowing that one of her classmates had picked it up and probably won’t give it back. But she miraculously gets it back; after last bell, Laura was at her locker getting her stuff together and a boy named Trevor quickly gives the book back, as if he hadn’t made any contact with Laura in order to stay “cool”, but this doesn’t faze Laura one bit. Plus, on the cover of the book, there was a little Post-It note that said “Sorry about what happened. Hope this helps.”

This is a look inside some of the lives of some of America’s teenagers today. Most aren’t even lucky enough to have someone help them out a bit like Trevor did for Laura. The only thing standing in the way of the bullied person getting help is the bystanders who just encourage this atrocious behavior that gets no one anywhere. Let’s face it, if you saw someone sprawled out over the hallway floor because they were tripped by “Miss Perfect”, you probably would just giggle, even though you know that it’s not right. Or would you be the fish swimming the other way, rebelling against the fish that don’t know any better than to follow the current, never veering away from their sameness? All of us teens are all the same, so why do we treat some of us like we’re made of gold and others as if they are made of dirt? If we worked together, we could really make a different world for the future teens’ futures. They wouldn’t have to worry if the queen bee and her worker bees that buzz around her perfect beehive she has built approves of them because there would be no queen bee or king bee reigning over anyone. But that doesn’t happen because we Americans are lazy; we hate hard-work. It would be really hard work to swim against the deeply ingrained current, so we just let the current’s flow push us along, so when there happens to be an obstruction in our oblivion, we resent it and try to get it to flow the same way. We try so hard sometimes that we make the obstruction disappear. Forever. We need to stop this. I hope that if you see someone trying to make the obstruction disappear today, you will help keep it alive and visible to the whole world. Please. They will thank you so much, and so will I.