"The truth is an amalgam of falsehoods."

This is something I stumbled upon while pondering how multifaceted I and a multitude of other human beings are.  You wear a mask depending on where you are, with whom, and when; the general scuttlebutt of society recognizes this without fail.  But society calls for you to realize your true self.  Gay people are encouraged to come out of the closet; Christians demand that you realize you have a God-shaped hole in your life; commercials blather on about how much better your life would be if only you bought this silver bullet of a product; politicians promise to take your world into a golden age if only you vote for them.

The construction of personal identity is an exercise taken by any adolescent climbing the summit of adulthood.  Sometimes the work of building never finishes; other times the result is something despicable or horrid, repulsive or ramshackle; and uncommonly, the edifice is a building of great beauty, perhaps majestic or inspirational.  Many teachers, particularly those who consider themselves Transformers, put themselves in the role of contractor, suggesting that a set of electrical wiring be done here, but not here.  They set themselves up as architects, casually passing out blueprints of identity, fearlessly informing their pupils that, in order to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to do this and you have to do it this way.  Trouble is these teachers aren't always right, and they're sometimes misguided themselves.  Even worse, the vast majority of transformational teachers are masked by other titles, such as news anchor, pop star, company executive, demagogue, l33t haX0r, or even author.  The list, truly, is endless, because all people have the potential to teach, even simply by being seen... or even by not being there.  Thousands upon millions of mathematics students still study under Pythagoras and Euclid, long dead inventors of an ancient art as they are.  The ages-old teachings of Jesus, Joshu, Moses, Zarathrustra, Buddha, Confucius, Hiwatha remain with us today.  But personal identity should not be the responsibility of teachers.  The teacher gives influence, but it is the individual itself that must steer their ship.  A teacher is a star in the sky, to which the sextet points; a first mate, calling for the sails to be dropped during a fierce storm; a lighthouse, warning that here be dragons of Scylla and Charybdis: sail close at your own peril.

I blame the onset of the Industrial Age.  With it came the factory, the relentless power of mass production made possible by the slave-like laborers that performed the job better assigned to machinery.  The Industrial Age's need for manpower was a double-edged blade.  On one hand, the need for education for all was recognized, garnering for all peoples the ability to read, rite, and rithmetize.  But on the other hand, it nullified the common people's capacity to think, slowly but steadily.  People became used to the idea that going to school meant you'd receive, in return for several years of hardwork, a package that was stamped, "Adulthood!  Here be a man of know-how."  Unfortunately, this man was never taught to be a man of think-how; present him with a foreign situation and he didn't know-how anything.  The school made no attempt at enlightening the student, but instead formed a cookie cutter about him and viciously slammed it down upon the malleable dough, slicing off undesirable traits with one swift blow.  And of course, that had to be drilled in, too, like a young baker-in-training pushing the mould deeper into the dough to be sure it was right and had cut through it all.  The analogy is just: the teachers were "in-training", so to speak.  The identity of a teacher was just starting to gain credence, and the idea of transformational individuals was new and untried.

Your parents expectations have always been the founding mainstay of identity.  In an almost Freudian analysis of childhood, the father and mother figures almost always form the foundations from which one builds their identity, and it takes great effort to change that foundation, if it is even possible.  But after the parents were themselves schooled into the conformed beliefs of the Industrial Age, they were quick to make the foundation of their children's identities easy to make standard.  Growing adolescents were left with no real chance to form their own identity, though those with powerful spirits were nevertheless capable of overriding this uniformity to lift themselves out of obscurity.  It is this powerful spirit that is capable of continuing growth after the cookie cutter has lifted.  Those such are the ones that became captains of industry, as they are called, as well as the brilliant intellectuals and scientists that maintained a life of moving and shaking while their former mates could only spin their gears to continue the functioning of the great machine.

The grand question of nature versus nurture has long been answered, of course, so it's pedantic to pursue it here, but it's always been a personal angst to feel that there is much nurture that's stamping out any hope of nature.  Individuals have been schooled, nowadays, to accept who they are, despite all their faults and their failures.  I can't accept that.  A failure is a failure, and to accept it means to lie down without bindings on the train track and wait to be run over, crushed to death by your own choice.  My sister, who has a learning disability, would rather call herself stupid than work hard to succeed.  And I, for one, simply cannot agree with that decision.

Perhaps the missing ingredient is risk.  People are being told how safe and easy things are.  There's no danger, no possibility of failure, no inconveniences, no hidden messages or uncertainties.  This dearth of risk is possibly what gave rise to action films, where the audience vicariously participates in a death-defying thrill gauntlet of explosions, structural collapse, impossible villains, acrobatic spectaculars, romantic cliches, and questionable morals; and also, possibility, to the amusement park, where the rides are becoming more and more dangerous in appearance and feel, the primary attraction their heart-racing thrill.  Perhaps it also says something that these two spots are the main attractions of couples, reinforcing the age-old idea of knight and princess, the mask of thrill ushering in the same memories of Prince Charming fending off the dragon (mixing cliches, now?)  This same absence of risk may be the source of the delusions of grandeur most teenagers are ready to suffer, the stunts they pull in the skateboard park, the suicide bombings, the defiance of societal norms in rock and punk, the rallying cry of demagoguery.  The construction of personal identity happens through trial and fire; it's not something that pops out of the womb a dozen years after the baby comes out.  Athena sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus after the lightning god suffered unbearable pains.  Hercules labored twelve impossible tasks before becoming the television knight errant of good-doing fame.  Ask any rags-to-riches story and they'll respond, "Blood, sweat, toil and tears."  Not possible without risk.

Frontline's documentary, The Merchants of Cool, classified the stereotype teenagers were being stuffed into as The Mook and The Midriff.  The mook is trapped in childhood, never truly growing up; the midriff is obsessed with becoming twenty-five at the age of twelve.

And girls get dragged down there right along with boys. The media machine has spit out a second caricature. Perhaps we can call this stereotype "the midriff." The midriff is no more true to life than the mook. If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult. If he doesn't care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances. If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex. The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment. "I am midriff, hear me roar. I am a sexual object, but I'm proud of it." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/etc/script.html)

It's more of the cookie-cutters I referred to earlier.  It's simply a different cookie-cutter; a gingerbread-man instead of a christmas tree, you might say.  To carry out the analogy, the difficulty is in getting these individuals with slashed sides their chance in the oven, and then their trial in reality on the plate.  But the problem is also in perception.  The teachers I classed above believe that those sharp edges of the cookie-cutter are pruning knives or forms of refinement.  In reality, they're closer to castrations, or plucking out the primary feathers and denying a bird the ability to fly.

This is why the military is so effective, nowadays, for turning out good men and women. (I remain a steadfast discourager of the necessity of a military, but for all its bad reasons, it has its good results.) They are put through their paces, broken and built up again, shown the world and taught strength of character.  The seclusion and surety of home-ness is grinded up and tossed out.  They are taught awareness, in all situations, and have learned to seek change in order to make things right. While they're not taught to question, its fault pales in comparison to the blatant ineffectiveness of the traditional order of grade school.  Risk is forced upon them; the baptism of fire unrelentingly conflagrating them, much like an oven to cookies.  They must rise to the challenge even as the convection currents pump heat into them; they must have a taste of great deliciousness when they first come out, still warm to the touch; and when they grow cold, the taste must remain, despite the rough texture of their bite.  Authenticity is a much sought-after quality, but it remains an elusive one to all but the lucky few.  I don't believe in luck.  Authenticity does not mean that there's some core You waiting to emerge when you accept it; it's a realization that you are the sum of all your pasts, shameful or glorious, and that your future is what you make it.  You are not simply the prom queen or the class clown; but you were those, and eventually, you no longer were those.  The truth is both the no longer and the right now.  The truth is an amalgam of falsehoods.