Whoever said that youth is wasted on the young certainly never spent time with students from Boston Latin School - at least not with Mary Ellen Bingham, Tim Grace, Ronaldo "Rolo" Rauseo-Ricupero and Justina Wong, four members of the class of 2000. The quartet sat down one night in August to give their take on a range of issues and proved that age is, as the saying goes, relative.

What impact does the media have on teens and how they behave?

MEB I think I'm probably a little more sensitive, but I think that when the media tried to blame the movie Basketball Diaries for the Columbine shooting, people should have been able to separate it. I don't think it has a real impact on all teenagers.

JW I was thinking about another type of media. I know girls that read magazines that focus just on how you look and your weight. That has a lot of effect on teenagers, especially girls. We're so impressionable. Whatever they throw at us, we take in.

MEB I agree. I buy magazines, but I always feel guilty because I know quite a few people that do have complexes and a lot of it does have to do with magazines. Some people are computer-altered so that they are not even that thin, but people actually think they look like that.

TG All our parents were baby boomers. So we've all grown up on the belief that you can do anything and be who you want to be. The media might instigate a few things, they might be the catalyst, but I think when it gets down to it, no one's going to do something that they really don't want to do.

RR Absolutely. I hate when the media says, "This kid got this idea to shoot this person from this movie." That is not representative of teenagers in general.

TG But there's so much media. There's the Internet and newspapers and magazines and TV. The media is a business, and all they want to do is make money off of us. I'm a strong believer that we control the media instead of the media controlling us. Society has to turn the media around. We can't count on the media to turn society around.

Technology has been a big part of your lives. Is it moving too fast, just fast enough or too slowly?

JW We're so lucky growing up with so much technology. We can e-mail anyone, and we can use the Web. I don't remember AOL or anything like that when I was growing up, but my younger cousins have AOL and computer games. It's amazing what can be done.

MEB I don't think it's going too fast. If there's someone smart enough to create it, there are a lot more people that are smart enough to catch up and figure it out. Society is getting more and more educated, so it's never going to get to a point where society can't handle it.

TG I think it's moving at a great speed. It's a little overwhelming sometimes - like when you buy a $500 CD burner and two weeks later it's goes down to $175. The only thing that I think isn't moving fast enough is an ethics code. If you compare it to the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution happened so quickly. Small businesses turned into huge megapowers and worldwide corporations in a matter of 40 years. But, they had an ethics code to keep up with the expansion of business.

RR But business had employees that they had control over. They had quality of life issues to deal with. That's not the same with the Internet, which may shape how many commercials I see a day but it's not going to be the all-powerful teller of how I'm going to live my life. I don't think we should have an ethics code. I think if you have the belief in something enough to build a Web site, that's your fun. Whether anybody visits or not, that's their business. Overall, I don't think it's moving fast enough. There's only so much you can fit into a newspaper or a half-hour news section.

In today's political climate, would you be proud to say you are a politician?

TG I think it's like any other job. You're proud to say you're a politician if you're a good politician. You're proud to say you're a fry chef if you're a top-notch fry chef. But if you're just doing it to get by, I don't think you're very proud of it.

RR I had an altercation about this today. I was at a school committee meeting and was in favor of ending the racial quota. At the end of the meeting, a woman who is very active in the school committee said, "So I see you really are a little politician, aren't you?" It's a noble profession, and a lot of people are trying to do good work. But when you hear it as a bad word, it kind of turns you the wrong way. She implied that I was a sell out.

Does your generation have a cause, like your parents had with civil and women's rights?

JW No. We reap the rewards and don't have a cause of our own.

TG Our generation is just cruising through life.

MEB And later on, our kids are going to have to deal with these issues again.

JW We're so aware and conscious because of what's happened in the past.

TG Exactly. We grew up around issues like recycling and the environment issues, but they are not our causes.

RR I'm the hope for what? You've done it all!

TG We don't have a name either. I'm technically Generation X. Everyone else here, born after 1982, is the "MTV" generation.

MEB I don't want to be known as that, sorry.

How do you each define success?

RR I've narrowed it down to whatever the opposite of math is. Actually, I'm happy with where I am now. I was born in Colombia two months premature. I came here when I was five months old weighing five pounds. The doctor said if I had not been here two days earlier, I would have died. I'm awed out of my mind that I'm here right now. And what I'm going toward is a place where I can be happy with who I am and be financially successful. I'm not interested in being filthy rich. I want to be able to send my kids to the schools they want to go to, and I want to know that I'm not living from paycheck to paycheck. But other than that, I'm not looking for millions.

MEB That basically sums it up for me, too. Success to me is about achieving your goals. If you overcome even the smallest goal, you're successful. Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I have so many goals in life that if I even meet half of them, I'll feel successful. Maybe that's part of being an athlete.

JW For me, success is about being happy. I want to know that I did something with my life. So many people think that being rich is success, but when I look down the road, that's not the first thing that sticks out in front of me.

TG I consider myself very fortunate that I've always known what I wanted to do with my life. Since I was eight, I've wanted to be a musician. People usually define success as being happy and settled. I would define success as being happy and unsettled. My life is just this constant adventure. I'm always doing new things and have music as a soul companion. I think if I can do that for the rest of my life, then that's success. •

Click Next Page to return to the Bulletin page