Oppositional Defiance

Remember the bad kids in high school? The ones who didn’t make it onto the honour roll or the dean’s list? In my day they were the long-haired kids (the boys) who wore James Dean-style denim jackets and smoked in the bathrooms. I doubt if those kids in the ’60s and ’70s even knew who James Dean was, but he wasn’t yet too old-fashioned.

Today a kid like that would be labelled having ODD—Oppositional Defiance Disorder—and would probably be put on some sort of medication to “calm him (or her) down.” I’m not sure if kids like that even exist today; they all have likely been hammered into a uniform puddle of compliance.