Most peers at this age consider friendship to be one of the most valuable factors in our lives. Phrases regarding the significance of friendship such as “Best Friends Forever” are drilled into our minds, creating the perception in our minds that friendship ought to be priceless and close to our hearts. While those descriptions mentioned earlier on are indeed true, I noticed that people have failed to apply those ideas into practice. Instead, I find the deprivation of genuine friendship and backstabbing to increase among the social clichés in this school.
Picture a pair of friends who are supposedly close with each other. Their facebook profiles are swarmed with each other’s wall posts, gifts, and tagged pictures. Their comments to each other comprised of the BFF abbreviation with endless xoxo’s. In another scene, a group of people decided to hate one of the friends mentioned above. The other friend of the mentioned pair associates with them frequently. Whenever the group slanders the particular person, the other pal would join in the conversation.
Although I made that seemingly exaggerated story up, the similar problem is ever present in our school society. I don’t know how many times I have heard people casually talking bad about a certain person to other people – even though they were ostensibly best friends. To make it worse, no signs of guilt were shed throughout this twisted, sad activity. From the way I see it, everyone has accepted this as a means of socializing – not only do they think it is acceptable, they also presume that they can trust other people not to spread the horrible truth of their fickleness. Little do they know that secrets are unfortunately meant to be broken in high school. Soon enough, the targeted victim would know about the backstabbing deeds his or her friend had done and would ask the same thing I had proposed earlier on: where did all sincere friendships go?
While true friendship might be scarce, we should not let the ongoing problem to thrive and deteriorate whatever friendship morals we have left. I know from personal experiences that it is difficult to defend the person whom other people outwardly mock about in my presence. I also underwent a period of time when I didn’t understand the real meaning of friendship – frankly speaking, I too was a hypocrite, following the distorted trend of judging and criticizing people who were supposed to be my own friends. However, I’ve learnt to realize that although there is a great deal of peer pressure, there’s nothing worse than not standing up for whom you love. I think the act of defending a friend whom you hold dear to your heart is admirable, even more so if you have to give up your social status or a group of friends to hold firm into your beliefs.
In by saying the aforementioned opinions, I did not say that this task is easy to tackle. We can’t help but to fall short of our convictions – even I struggle with this problem everyday – for we are not perfect. There are also some divisive issues that lie within the friendship morals; to what extent should we defend our friends? Should we ferociously defend them to the point of death, or can keeping our mouths merely shut be seen as an acceptable way of defending our friends? After all, other people also have the same amount of rights to speak their opinions. Perhaps I’ll talk about this in my next blog – in the mean time, discussions and comments are welcomed for this issue.
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