marijuana kconnors, 2004
When you’ve lived a lot of life, you tend to see patterns in generations that follow yours. And of course, if you’re like me, you can’t keep from relaying it.
A danger for young girls today is the same danger their mothers and grandmothers once faced: an attraction to ‘bad boys.’ How that fascination comes to sit in a young mind, I honestly don’t know, but long ago, I remember feeling it myself.
You know a particular boy is bad, that he’s made terrible choices, yet you’re drawn to him. Worse, you think you can change him.
He may tell you he really wants to change, yet he never takes the first step. And then, he talks about the freedom to do whatever he wants, as if that sort of freedom is always good. He tries to make you see that you should want it, too.
But be aware. That kind of freedom is far from good. It’s in disguise. It isn’t really freedom. It’s just another case of addiction to drugs, sex, or cheating, just plain laziness, or maybe even fear of the world itself. In any case, stay away. Bad boys hold nothing but grief for you.
This doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually change–without you, by the way. Many honorable men, even many saints, were first horrible sinners. But often bad boys stay that way.
A young teenage girl who thinks she can change a bad boy and shape him into a prince is living a fairytale. And she may live it for a year or two until she matures enough to understand that the boy she needs, the prince for her, won’t be a bad boy at all.
Translating a World on the Edge 