This past weekend, my husband and I went to our old high school to see his sister in their one act plays. These are a series of student written and student acted short plays. They usually last about 10 minutes each. Since they are student written and acted, it is always interesting to go watch them. They usually deal with teen issues like having a crush and awkward situations. This year, they had a few like that but there were also a large amount of drug abuse or death related one acts. I come from a fairly affluent community in Salt Lake City. Most of the school is LDS and live super normal and happy lives. So it surprised me to see so many one acts on drugs and death. I asked my sister-in-law if there was a drug problem at the school now and she was as baffled as I was. She also talked about how the students who had written the drug one acts were happy and cheerful and didn't seem like they would write about drugs at all.
This is super interesting to me because had a stranger judged my home community based solely on these one acts, they would think that there was a serious drug problem at my high school. So sometimes media can reflect things that aren't totally true. I think that, in the end, the students that wrote about drugs and death were just trying to be the most dramatic they could be and those were the topics that felt the most dramatic. But it was a good example to me of how looking at just media can be misleading in trying to understand.
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