I am crying really hard right now

There was a tragedy at Interlochen last night. Someone chose to do something they knew was against the rules, and as a result, Interlochen lost an amazing student. A gifted performance artist is leaving one of the most unique schools in the country, all because someone thought they were immune to consequences. Someone lost a chance last night, and it could have been prevented.

Why am I being needlessly melodramatic? Because I know the person who is going home, and I will miss him more than I can express. Because I know people cross lines and realize too late that they can't go back. Because I hate feeling so helpless, knowing that these people do cross lines and that there is virtually nothing I can do to stop them.

Remember my Red Ribbon Week post? If you go to school with me, you know that at the end of October I ran around with a box of ribbons and a carefully-prepared anti-drug speech, trying to convince my friends to keep our school drug-free. This is why. Moments like these, when you realize just how heavily something as innocuous-sounding as a cigarette can do irreparable damage to a person's reputation, career, and life. No one likes to think about these things. They think that by smoking, drinking, and doing drugs they will be going against the grain, fighting the power, sticking it to the man. They see themselves as beatniks, hippies, rebels.

I will admit, there was a time when I admired the dark glamour of these kinds of rebellion. Every teenager sees, at some point or another, a person smoking a cigarette or throwing back a shot like it's no big deal, and they automatically jump to the conclusion that the person doing these things is "cool." It's natural. It's understandable. And I confess that, although I've never done anything like this, there was a time when I secretly wondered what it would be like to smoke, to drink, to "rebel." To "be cool."

But after seeing dozens of my classmates expelled for "being cool," I know better.

At a public high school these things mostly go unnoticed. If I had wanted to, I could have wandered off to the courtyard, gotten stoned, and gone to class without so much as a custodian calling me out on it. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to see the effects of doing things like that. Going out and getting plastered at regular and frequent intervals can do astonishing things to a person's reputation, 99.9% of them negative, even if your teachers don't care.

But at a private school, getting into substances leads to serious s#@%. Don't believe me? How many posts have you seen me write about drug use, or about seeing my friends or my friends' friends get expelled? All it takes is a text message. All it takes is for your hall counselor to see you slip something into your pocket. All it takes is one time before the manure hits the air circulator. The next thing you know, the witch-hunt is on, and people are frantically clearing their phones and taking out their trash and their suitemates' trash, just in case they did or have something that might be incriminating, regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong.

I don't know what the solution is. But I firmly believe in what I wrote back in October, about making a difference one tiny step at a time. I firmly believe that it is possible to fight the system without resorting to pot or booze. And I firmly believe that if you believe in something and you have something to say, there is someone, somewhere, who will hear you.

And right now, Interlochen is hurting because someone did not think there was any other way to say what he wanted to say than to break the oldest rule in the book.

I can't elaborate any further. I can't judge. All I can say is that I will miss him, and I wish him luck and hope that he can be strong and continue to kick ass in the arts world, with or without Interlochen Arts Academy.