"Whelp, guess I gotta burn my sneakers now. Sucks. I really like 'em." - My 29-year-old roommate who does whatever Twitter tells him to It's been interesting watching you morph from the criminal to the victim in your head. Yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Between Harry Potter the first book and Harry Potter the first movie, Columbine and September 11 happened. By Harry Potter the book I was designing cybernetic implants and mixing industrial bands to pay for college. By Harry Potter the movie I was a fuckin' architectural consultant. I was hatched. My little second cousin who does nothing but pot in Reno? He was three years old. If you were ten in '97 you graduated a year or two before the Great Recession. You are the millennial crushed in the maw of the new economy and by now you're just getting used to the fact that you'll never truly be able to afford a house. Your teenage years were the ones where bullying was that thing that got the cops involved. If you hot-dropped out of college into teaching high school you are the embodiment of overprotective authoritarianism and those neckbeards in the Harry Potter bands? They're the perpetual fandom that has convinced themselves that it's somehow okay for a 30-year-old man to be into Evangelion. Not everyone, of course. It's never everyone. But it's enough: why the fuck are people driving around with Deceptacon stickers on their cars? What the Actual Fuck? Back when you could still reasonably watch actual Deceptacons on TV in 6th grade, you'd get your fucking lights punched out for mentioning them in 7th. Now? Now we measure our tenuous cultural allegiances by whether or not we wear a "Property of Hogwarts" hoodie while we jog in our Lululemons. Here's what I'm saying: shit changed, yo, and Harry Potter is a part of that. Not the only part, not the most important part. But what you make your dreams out of influences how you live your life. But if you're ten when Katniss Everdeen comes on the scene? You're 21. You've learned that governments exist to be overthrown. You've been backed into a corner your whole life, discounted in everything you do and treated as a problem by a generation that doesn't know how to fucking live. One of the many, many poignant aspects of going to school with a bunch of surly Running Start kids in my mid '40s was hearing a 17-year-old mutter "goddamn millennials" under his breath while talking about his instructor. I did a spit take and he said "what? They're indecisive, they're always on their fucking phones and they have no idea how to get anything done because they're so wishy-washy!" He's gonna be fine - he's programming CNC punches for $80k a year after 2 years of school. His instructor? Begging for $29k with an MFA in teaching. You - you're conflating a couple things. Yes by all means you're a rebel and being a rebel is tough. But you're also a hooligan. Hooligans do not get the concessions that rebels do. After I declared myself the Antichrist I had a family court judge release one of my younger friends into my custody because he was in jail for beating his mom. I was definitely one of the surlier kids in school but I committed no petty crime that would give them an excuse to treat me as a hooligan. Hooligans lose. Always. Petty criminals never get the respect or leeway that prisoners of conscience do. Me disagreeing about the authority of the vice principal over my freedom of expression? That's a political discussion. You breaking into the teacher's lounge? Hooliganism. Try being a rebel for a while without being a hooligan. 