Read My Blog … Or I’ll Kill Your Dog

    So, my mother wasn’t exactly rich.  She moved back home with her mother and father with us three kids in tow after divorcing my father who disappeared from our lives altogether for reasons only he can convey.  We struggled, but my mom and grandparents did what they could for us.  We led seemingly normal lives with a safe roof over our heads and three square a day.  I’m thankful for that. 

    In school, however, it’s quite one thing to have levels of social diversity.  The rich kids are going to hang out with the other rich kids that are being reared in their own neighborhoods.  After all, even city ordinances allow only certain homes to be built in certain neighborhoods.  You’re not going to find a double-wide in a neighborhood of estates, in other words.  So there’s no big surprise that rich kids are snooty and poor kids are trash.  It’s been that way for thousands of years.  Me saying it in this blog isn’t going to raise eyebrows or change anything.  So screw it.  I’m not looking to reform social diversity here.  There are all kinds of social diversities in school.  There are the jocks; rich or poor … the heads; rich or poor, the nerds; rich or poor, the rich; rich or poor … and the reason I say that is because even the rich diversify from one another.  Was the money family money or was it new found fortune?  New found fortune is often scrutinized by family fame and fortune; those born with silver spoons in their mouths, for example.  There are other social groups in schools and I’m sure they’re not called jocks and heads and nerds anymore.  Who knows?  I graduated way back in 1981.  By the time I graduated, I had plenty of pent up frustration with the politics of school and how the system worked … or didn’t work.  I guess that in itself set me up for the best education of the real world than all that time I spent sitting in all those classes learning mandated studies.  There were teachers who had favorite students and passed grades accordingly.  That was not fair to the others.  There were teachers who hated their jobs and weren’t afraid to let you know about it.  That was not fair to the students.  I didn’t let any of this bother me too much.  Well, to tell you the truth, it bothered me plenty, I just gave up caring about it.  To me, it was nothing more than another social group.  And me?  I wasn’t a head … I wasn’t a jock … I wasn’t rich … I was poor … but I worked after school and instead of wearing the clothes my mother could afford to buy for me, I bought and paid for my own clothes to “fit-in” status symbol-wise to a couple of categories higher on the social status than I actually deserved to be.  You had to wear Levi jeans to “be cool” at school.  You had to have name-brand sneakers or hiking boots … or Timberlane work boots.  Everything you wore had to have a brand name on it to be cool.  And it couldn’t be just any name.  The nerds didn’t care what they wore.  That’s what made them nerds.  Maybe they cared plenty, but were unable to do anything about it. Although, they spent more time on their studies and not so much wondering what the fluff they were going to wear, they passed their grades and probably are having the last laugh at the expense of the vanity of those of us who did care.  My hat’s off to those that did so.  I don’t know why it seemed important to me to be someone I wasn’t.  I was embarressed to be poor.  Probably because of the way it made me stick out in a crowd.  Probably because I was an attention monger.  A class clown.  A trouble-maker in sorts.  I would function in my studies.  I did well for those teachers that appreciated my work.  I also challenged the system to those teachers that found it necessary to point out their favorites.  I exploited them and made their year as miserable as they made mine.  It was a personal challenge of mine.  

     As mentioned, I wasn’t really a jock, nerd, head, or a social.  I was all of them.  In essence, I was none of them.  I spoke and befriended anyone who would give me the time of day.  It didn’t matter what society they belonged to.  I experimented with the pot … but I swear I never inhaled … (yeah … right) and I played sports … and I wore the right clothes … and I fit in … because I financed the whole lie with my own earnings.  My own blood, sweat, and tears.  Don’t pity me.  I’m not looking for that.  It was my decision and I have no issues with how I was raised or what decisions I made during my school years.  I harbor no pent up frustrations about that time in my life … well … maybe one. 

It’s true I didn’t care much for teachers that didn’t care much whether they were really teaching or not.  As mentioned, I had ways of getting even with them and I’m rather proud of the fact that I inhibited that quality to make their lives miserable for the short time they knew me.  But the one thing about school that really just screamed exploitation in social diversity was “the free lunch line.”  Has anyone ever heard of this?  Do they still do this?  What the fluff is that all about?  A welfare line of sorts.  In the cafeteria, two lines were formed for the lunch tickets to gather from students to eat the same exact lunch.  There was the regular kids from normal hard working households … and the rich kids … and then there was a line formed for the kids that were not from families that made a lot of money.  They fell under a program that offered their lunches to them for free.  Well … not really free.  There was one small price to pay.  The large blinking neon sign hanging above each one of our heads telling the entire cafeteria  and school population that we were dirt poor.  Our families were on welfare.  Our mothers and fathers were societal losers that stayed home all day and watched soap operas and bilked the system … that we lived in filthy double wides or trailer parks … None of which were necessarily true, but scenarios were certainly perceived by those who had to pay for their lunches with their parents money.  The “normal” and the “rich” kids.  If you got free lunches, you received a completely different colored lunch ticket.  Although I was a white kid in a predominantly white school, suddenly I had a different color because I came from a lower class family income bracket.  Suddenly, I was  minority among my very own.  This isn’t something the school could just work out by counting how many of the families were poor and give us the same colored lunch ticket at the beginning of the week?  Mail them to us incognito?  I’m sure there were thousands of different opportunities they could have created to make it a less embarrassing scenario for those of us that had to stand in that line.  They simply chose not to.  I stood in that line.  I’m proud to say I did, now.   Back then I wasn’t.  Back then it ate at me daily.  I didn’t always stand in that line, however.  You see.  I mentioned that I was a working lad and I financed my entire social status in school.  That included paying for my own lunches, although my family still fell under the stringent guidelines of me benefiting from free lunch at school.  I stood in the “normal” lunch line and pulled money from my own wallet that I had earned myself to be considered “normal.”  Because my school made the conscious decision to exploit poor kids.  To insure segregation from the rich.  I understood this at a very early age and resented it from then on.  I still resent it.  If I could find a lawyer that chased ambulances part time and offered me restitution from this school for all the years of lunches I paid for, hey … why the hell not?  It seems everyone else is litigious.  And … I could use the money, too.  

     With all joking aside, I would like to point out that if this procedure still takes place in schools anywhere … everywhere, that it should be STOPPED immediately and a way found to preserve the integrity of the developing children trying to grow up in society with limitless boundaries for the sake of their education.  Does it really need to be announced to the school that any of the children are from poor families?  Living in the neighborhoods they live in and the house they live in is all the social diversity a person needs.  The clothes they wear will define their wealth or lack thereof.  Making them stand in a separate line for free lunch is nothing more than exploitation.  Find out what’s going on in schools and speak up about it.  We’re never going to stop social diversification.  The lord knows we need that … I guess.  But what we can control, we simply should make an effort to try.  It’s for the youth of our nation and their tender and delicate developmental years.  

Jody L. Campbell