Lessons I've Learned From Harry Potter 7

So just like the rest of all the youthful denizens of this fine protoliterate generation, I've finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's a bittersweet thing; naturally, I've wanted to know what happens to little Harold and his gang of thieves ever since they left the Shire, or whatever, but now that the series has officially ended, I can't help but find myself untethered to reality, cut away from my only source of entertainment, enlightenment, and hope in this miserable muggle world of mine. So in a mostly futile effort to milk the series for a little more than it may have ever been worth, I'm going to try to extract a few life lesssons that will bear relevance long after the word Horcrux ceases to mean anything to us and J.K. Rowling finally drowns in her swimming-pool-sized vault of gold.

This is an artist's representation of J.K. Rowling's hidden vault, evidently featuring a crude facsimile of Scrooge McDuck.

Lesson #1: Dropping out of school to live in the woods is a perfectly acceptable idea if some old guy that the government dispises tells you that it's your destiny.

Timothy Leary and Albus Dumbledore have more in common than their ruggedly handsome looks.

A lot of kids these days get bombarded with that dogmatic slogan, "Just get your degree!" to the point where they're left in a stupor that resembles the zombies from Resident Evil 4 (that is, they can still run, climb ladders, wield weapons, and mumble in Spanish, but they lack higher brain function and are effectively controlled by insectoid blood parasites under the command of a religious fanatic bent on world domination, which, as we all know, is just a metaphor for contemporary American society).

Speaks for itself, really.

I think Rowling has finally decided to use her fame to some positive social end by encouraging us youngsters to loosen our shackles of conformity and take some risks with the course of our lives. Maybe we won't get to seek out and destroy Horcruxes, but think of this way: maybe we will.

Lesson #2: Kids should drink liquor to make them feel better about tragedy. In the chapter "A Fallen Warrior", Harry and the other squirts all share in the venerated cathartic ritual of imbibing controlled substances. And it makes them feel better. Especially Hermione, who later that chapter disappears with Ron and is overheard yelling "Engorgio! Engorgio!" at the top of her lungs. The important thing to remember here is that our Muggle tragedies will likely never be as severe as Harry Potter's; he's the Chosen One, and we're just boring Americans with such a preponderance of privilege and shortcuts to success that we actually interpret laziness and low ambition as iconoclastic forms of rebellion. Our tragedies are a little more subtle, and so our occasions for drinking liquor are many. For instance, getting into an argument with anyone; feeling lonely; having it be late and dark at the same time; being in college; hearing someone say something ambiguously gay in the Lord of the Rings films; or, most tragic of all tragedies, having leftover liquor.

Lesson #3: Sometimes teenagers really are righteous. Remember the first time you Sparknote'd The Catcher in the Rye, and you thought Holden was an awesome character who saw everything clearly? You ever go back to it, years later, and read it with just a few more years of experience, only to realize that Holden is a hypocrticial, unreasonable, condescending jerk who overthinks everything and will only remain unhappy due to his own deficiencies, and not society's? It has to make you sick. Luckily, J.K. Rowling is a much more sophisticated and responsible writer than J.D. Salinger, and she has fashioned a story and a central character who turns out to be right about everything, except the things he's wrong about, which he learns of just in time to be right about them again. In a few years we can read this again (but of course we won't; we'll be on to the next craze) and find a Harry that is just as righteous as ever, and we'll be able to take heart knowing that if our hero could have been right about everything even when most of the world was against him, chances are good that we're right too about our own theories.

Mark David Chapman pictured here bearing an uncanny resemblance to the much more insidious Jared Leto.

This is what makes the Potter series truly great: moral clarity. Gray area? No thank you. Next thing you know you'll be trying to convince me that the Democrats aren't perfect. And then I'd have to throw you in prison, force you to endure conditions more safe and sanitary than 75% of the world population's, and then reintegrate you into society in a minimum-wage job at a small business that still earns you more than your employer, whom your children, after going to their prestigious universities on full scholarship (since working-class scholars are so hot right now), will regard with earnest, elitist contempt, both for being the slave-driver oppressor-of-the-people business-owner, and for being uneducated and not having time to read the New York Times or learn about Fair Trade coffee, and hopefully in the end, these little brats of yours will finish their disseration on The Is-Ought Failures of Ayn Rand's Objectivism and land a plum professorship at a small liberal arts school in New England where they can have a Christmas bonus higher than the salary of most of their town's residents and somehow live under the delusion that they are exempt from the vices of capitalism because they are entrenched in academia, and whenever the guilty pangs of truth start hurting them as they realize that, no, not everyone can "get away" to Nantucket when things just get "too much", they'll find refuge in lip-service, mostly about poverty rates among minorites and human rights violations in countries they would never dare invest in, let alone visit.

I totally forgot my point, but here's a picture of Hermione. Say something nice.