I am about to write a sentence that may shock some of you. Prepare yourself.

Teenagers are human beings.

There it is. The cat is out of the bag.

This seems like an obvious statement. It should be. Yet, teens are written about and observed and considered completely alien to the rest of the world.

A recent event, the school stabbings in Pennsylvania, brought to light an opinion that I have been harboring for quite some time.

The adult world holds little to no respect for teenagers.

A plethora of articles write about the acts of heroism from many of the students involved in the stabbings, like the pulling of the fire alarm or the quick thinking of tending the wounded with sweatshirts and other such things.  I am not saying that these acts were not heroic or courageous. They were and are and I am immensely thankful for people like that.

What I am saying is that it was disgusting and disappointing to see so many authors and commenters say they were shocked at such acts.

But the thing is, teenagers are capable of rational thought and compartmentalization in high-stress and/or life-and-death situations.  Acts like the ones above should not shock people.

A reason this mentality is so prominent is that our generation has not had to deal with widespread tense situations like the Great Depression or life during wartime or pending war and invasion like the Cold War era. We have not known anything different than post 9/11 America. We have not known anything but the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All we are supposed to have to deal with is hormones and high school drama. This is why we are not respected or acknowledged with respect. The adult world thinks this is all that we have to deal with, all that we are.

That has changed. We are now faced with crippling debt at the expense of further schooling for potential jobs that will not even be open to us. Our future is bleak as the government sucks up more and more money for less and less improvement for our country.  A president that promised to fix the economy and balance it has done little to come through on his promises and instead sends millions of dollars to a foreign country that had its fate already set in stone.

 The “grown-ups” see the rise in teen violence in these big spurts of school shootings and attacks yet do not recognize that we, the teens, have to deal with that on a daily basis. We have to deal with the pressure and mistakes of our nation’s past generations along with the pressure of the future ahead, but still they refuse to see us as people who think, who feel, who aspire and who live outside of school and gossip.

Essays and books written “to understand your teen” dehumanize us. It makes us seem like toys that need instructions to function, that we are a different species altogether.

Some writers who call themselves “young adult authors” and say they support us and believe us to be human and capable contradict themselves in their own writings.  They write teenaged characters in dystopian times worrying more about a love triangle instead of survival or furthermore, focusing on survival one minute and the next, back to the love triangle.

They write that they want to respect teens and the lives we lead but in reality it is just more adults parading around in a sea of hypocrisy and mocking us like everyone else.

The adults discuss how much they expect of us.  How we are “the future of America.”  Still, they view us as sniveling, hormonal fools.  How can we be the future if we are not capable of adult, mature thinking?

All the world sees is our mistakes. They pay no mind to how we handle, learn and redeem ourselves from those mistakes. That, I cannot understand.  All I can do, through the frustration and disappointment, is try to make my way in a teenage-hating world and hope for the better tomorrow we can bring.