Among all of the things I don’t miss about high school, one of the more prominent aspects is the drama. Not that college students are all that sophisticated, I have found that they too spread rumors and taunt social outcasts, but still, high school students are notorious for thriving off of conflict which at it’s core, was sparked by some random interaction. Which probably resulted from rubbing you the wrong way due to a simple case of bad communication. Then, before you know it, you spend four years hating someone because you thought they gave you a dirty look.

True story, my junior year in high school, when MySpace was still kind of new and exciting, some friends and I started an anonymous page and sent friend requests to people we knew, especially people we didn’t like. When our base of friends was strong enough, we used the page to vent and leave for all to see, some of the rudest, most scandalous, (sometimes funniest) comments ever. There was one girl in particular; I’ll call her “Ashley”, which I just flat out didn’t like. Truth of the matter is we probably said five words to each other during the whole time I knew her; I guess I just got “bad vibes” from her. One night, I logged on to MySpace under the anonymous page, and let loose on some true life “Mean Girls” type stuff all in the open for anyone to see. The next morning, one of my friends who helped create the page, called and said that a mutual friend of Ashley and mine, told her Ashley was crying her eyes out because of what some mean-hearted MySpacer had done. In that instant, I felt a strong sense of shame.

A similar display of cowardice and immaturity in Dardenne Praire, Missouri has a more tragic ending. After an argument with a friend, 13-year-old Megan Meier was the target of retaliation via MySpace, when the friends’ parents created an account posing as a young man interested in getting to know Megan. After gaining the trust of the young girl, the fictitious suitor began taking shots at her esteem by calling her fat among other things. Unable to cope with the rude remarks, Megan committed suicide in October of 2006.

Megan’s story is one of the more publicized cases of internet harassment among teens, and although the outcome isn’t always as severe, using the internet to bully or harass people can be dangerous. Whether Ashley or Megan, high school or college age, attack your problems head on and half the time you’ll find that it’s not even worth it, and that it takes more energy to adamantly hate someone, then to live in the illustrious words of Mary J. Blige and say “No More Drama”, because no argument or bad vibe is worth a life.
—Jazmyne Young