Oorah and hello to everyone reading this. My name is Brayden Haydensen. I’m a Senior at Hillbrook High School and (more importantly) a cadet in the prestigious JROTC. I believe in one core thing: Success is what happens when drive and ambition meet discipline. And I’m a deeply disciplined guy.
With this is mind, I want to talk about Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. For those of you who don’t know, I’ll break it down for you: In this study, Zimbardo broke his participants into two groups. One of the groups was locked in a makeshift prison, while the other group was allowed to be their guard. Over the next few days, the prison guards engaged in acts of so-called “torture,” “hazing” and “abuse.” And even though the experiment was going to last two weeks, they had to shut it down after just six days. And I think this is frankly insulting. In fact, I think I could do way WAY better. And this time, I’d win!
Let me break it down for you. As a decorated junior military man, I recognize that I am the last line of defense between my spongey, useless classmates and the endless parade of school shooters and pedophiles that surrounds us. I have to be tough. And sometimes, to be tough for someone, you have to be tough to someone. That’s why if I was in the Stanford Prison experiment, I would make sure the prisoners were all the degenerates that have ever been mean to me.
And I would get creative. First thing I’d do is institute a mandatory quiet hours policy. For them. You talk? You go into solitary. You sneeze? Guess what. Solitary. But that doesn’t mean I’d run a quiet prison. Me and all my other fellow JROTC guards would play a non-stop, twenty-four hour loop of the greatest song ever written: “Cotton-Eye Joe” by Rednex, with occasional “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback to soothe the poetic soul in each of us.
Also, meals are going to be privileges, not rights. To eat, they’re going to have to answer questions like: “Did Brayden get a girlfriend this summer?” (Yes, but she lives out of state. You don’t know her.) “How many push-ups can Brayden do?” (Twenty.) And “Does being in JROTC make you A) Cool B) Manly or C) Basically Not a Virgin? (Trick Question. It’s all of the above.)
I know some of you will start crying and saying that it’s inhumane. Lol. It might be a little bit strict, but this is human nature. This is how I would behave in the wild, and I can’t imagine anyone else is any different.