For this journal entry, we were to copy-change the Declaration of Independence. I felt it appropriate to free myself of the chains of my parents as they had been breathing down my neck about everything. (9-21-07)
When, in the course of events, it becomes necessary for ones kids to assume independence from their suffocating household from which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of state and college entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of their parents requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all teenagers and adults are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The history of teenage life is a history of repeated injuries and usurptions on the part of parents toward children, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over them. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
They have never permitted them to stay out past 12 o clock.
They have compelled them to submit to rules, in the formation of which they had no voice.
They have withheld from them rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded people- even criminals and hobos.
They have made them, if “involved”, in the eyes of their peers, utterly embarrassed.
They have denied them the facilities appropriate for throwing a decent party, all houses being locked upon their departure.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one half the people of this country, their social and political degradation- in light of the unjust motives mentioned above, and because teenagers to feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fradulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that we have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.
