Glee & dreams

I watched my second episode ever of “Glee” last week.  I watched the first episode because of the buzz, thought, “It’s a show about underdogs but they still need the white male jock to save them.  No thanks.”  I watched this episode because I wanted to hear Neil Patrick Harris sing.  (I’m sure I’m not the only one.)

Harris played a character whose dreams of Broadway stardom fizzled, and now has made it his mission in life to make sure no child ever suffers the disappointment he did.  He does this by lecturing high school show choirs about how their dreams will never come true so they should just give them up now, which he proceeds to do to our intrepid heroes.

That scene really upset me.  Really upset me.  I’m sure it was supposed to.  Either that, or I was supposed to think it was funny.  I couldn’t quite tell.  But it hit a little close to home.  Don’t ever do that.  Don’t ever tell a kid his/her dreams will never come true.

I was about sixteen when I started telling people I wanted to be a writer.  I got a lot of polite smiles.  And I had a few well-meaning and completely hateful adults tell me that I really ought to have something to fall back on because I would probably never become a writer.  You know why this is a really terrible thing to do to a kid?  Kids can’t argue with grown-ups.  They can try, they can pull out all sorts of rational, reasoned, well-thought out and correct arguments to counter them.  And the grown-up will just say, “Yes, but I’m the grown-up so I know more than you.”  As if that trumps everything.  And we wonder why teenagers get so surly.

Every once in a while I think about calling up those unimaginative adults who told me I would probably never become a writer.  But when I think about what to say to them, all that comes out are really impolite versions of “Screw you.”

The adults who tell kids that their dreams will never come true think they’re being helpful.  They think they’re saving the kids from some sort of disappointment.  But you know what?  Most kids will figure out pretty quickly whether they’re really going to go after that dream or not.  Most of them figure out on their own that they’d rather spend all that time and energy on something else, like starting a family or getting a rewarding job that they didn’t even know about when they were sixteen because let’s face it, you don’t really know what all is out there when you’re sixteen.  And because they figured it out on their own they’ll generally be okay with the fact they didn’t become a Broadway star.

You want a disappointed kid?  Find that kid at age thirty, looking back and wondering if he could have made it if he’d tried a little harder, if some grown-up hadn’t told him he needed to get a real job instead of following his dream.