What Does It Mean To Be Cool?

Central Argument: To be cool is to have self-control during the hard times and able to make an unusual decision to be the right decision.

                Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, the author of What Does It Mean To Be Cool? suggests that coolness is “a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion” where one is able to react accordingly to the situations to avoid or achieve some kind of reputation of oneself, but, usually, the cool ones are the people who are by themselves because they have different perspectives from the uncool ones which are the majority. It is not easy to achieve coolness along with a good reputation with others because then one need to be able to gain full control; one cannot let the emotion to overwhelm during tough situations.

                Coolness can help people to live longer. If the slaves who were taken out of their home from Africa, transported all the way to the United States, with weeks of being on a ship where there is no space to even stand fully, were not cool, then they would not have been able to survive all the hardships that they faced before they actually were auctioned. They also faced hardships even after the auction, up until the abolition of slavery. It is hard to keep coolness when such hard situation happens, but the slaves were cool as they are able to rebel their master in a different way that is not physical. The cool slaves were not punished because there was no evidence of them hurting their masters mentally.

                There are two types of people, the cool ones, and the not cool ones. In my old school, there consisted of more than eighty percent nerds whereas fifteen are the moderate and the rest does not care at all. The nerds obviously get high grades because they study, the moderate ones get about B to C the ones who don’t care are different. Some fails, but most gets high grade because they are just brainy. Teachers doubted the ability of these people and accused the students of being guilty of cheating. The defendants were called into the office to talk about the issues. The teachers basically got owned at the end because the questions raised to check the ability of the students were answered perfectly correctly. These people were considered the cool ones, but they were not accepted by most of others just because others like nerds are jealous that the cool ones do not have to study.

                To be cool does not mean positive reputation, but to be able to gain control over the situation and to offense the opponent in a way that the opponent is not able to do anything back but get annoyed and go away, or ignore.