Middle School Itch

Middle School Itch

Middle school stinks.  Here I am, one great big hormonal zit, sitting in “junior” high, a person without status or stature. Not a kid, not a teen and certainly not an adult. Stuck in a place where they try to make me learn stuff for no apparent reason. None of this stuff relates to real life. You’re nothing here but a label: jock, brown-noser, slacker, techie, band geek, drama geek, geek-geek.  

Worst of all, they keep testing you!  And it’s not like you hear on TV: This is a test. This is only a test. No, all you hear is “This test is going to affect your grade, your promotion, the rest of your life!  If you don’t pass, you might as well buy a one-way ticket to loser-ville. And you had better do well, or you, the school, your parents, the country and the universe will suffer.” It is all on your shoulders. Me, the middle school brat, the nobody. 

Talk about stress. Not only do I have to do well in my studies, I have to be popular. Popular!  How do I do that? Do I go along with the crowd?  Do I hang out with the right people?  And most importantly, do I wear the right clothes?  Fashion “no-nos” can follow you for life – at least into high school. You will always be the kid who wore the Nikes the day after every else had shifted to ‘Asics or the kid who wore a b-ball cap the day everyone went topless (so to speak.)

And how about at home?  My parents expect me to act like an adult but treat me like a kid. My big sister despises me. My older brother throttles me. My little brothers won’t give me any privacy. Don’t they know I have important thoughts to think and for heavens sake, need my own room?   

Time management is a contradiction in terms for me. How can I possibly manage a schedule that includes chores and homework, band practice and soccer practice? My computer screams answer me! Texts and Tweets pile on top of each other. Video games demand new champions and surfing the net eats hours of my day. I’ve got to see the latest movies and watch the right shows so I can at least appear cool. 

Sleep? I come alive around eight every night and can’t drop off until after midnight. Then they drag me out of bed at six to catch the bus at seven so I can be sitting in class a half-hour later while still in a zomboid state to discuss Shakespeare or divide fractions by percentages. The teacher is collecting homework. Did I remember to bring (or even do) it?  Where’s my folder? Where’s my book bag? Where’s my brain? At home, asleep in my cozy bedroom that still has the Elmo curtains my mother made when I was in kindergarten.

I feel like I am in that rat race the teachers keep yammering on about. Running as fast as I can while stuck in one place. And then my mom yells at me because I’m not cheerful! Cheerful?  I can barely manage civil. Polite? Well that depends. Does she want Sunday School polite or locker room polite?  Can’t I just be me?

Middle school stinks.  

 But here I am, stuck for three years (at least) with a bunch of people who don’t understand me.  I learned in my psych class that the teen-age brain is not fully developed and will not be fully functioning until I am in my twenties. 

Why can’t they cut me a break? Let my brain develop guys! Don’t judge me by the size of my feet but by the size of my brain!  You say you can’t see my brain? Then listen to me. Watch me grow. For heaven’s sake, help me along! That’s what you keep telling me your job is. So act like it. We can all get through this together. 

It’s only three years and then I’ll be a teen. Imagine the fun we’ll have then!

The Aristoi

The Aristoi

Second in Series

During the 2012 presidential campaign, the term the “99 percent” was bandied about. The “99 percent” refers to the income and wealth inequalities perceived in the United States, that is, that the bulk of wealth in our nation is concentrated in only 1% of the population, and that the fate of the many is decided by the few. The term may date to the twenty-first century, but the concept is centuries old. 

Joseph Ellis, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Founding Brothers, refers to “eternal political verities.” One is that there has been and there always will be opposing parties. Another, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, is “that everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed.” In other words, we are always looking out for “Number One.” 

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the best of friends and the worst of political enemies. As delegates to the Continental Congress, they had forged a friendship on the anvil of Independence. As presidential rivals and opposing political ideologues, they had slung accusations across party lines. After many years in retirement, the two were reunited in a correspondence in which they both renewed their friendship and attempted to, in Adams’s words, “explain ourselves to each other.” These letters were not only addressed to one another but to posterity. 

Adams and Jefferson addressed many political questions, including the use and origin of power. Adams had written three books arguing that political power was inevitably concentrated in the hands of a few prominent people and families. This system dated back from the feudal barons of Europe and Asia and the landed gentry of Elizabethan England to the plantation owners of the American south. Adams regretfully acknowledged that history proved that the “many always deferred to the few,” as was “established by God Almighty in the Constitution of Human Nature.” In other words, the one percent ruled in the past, the present, and the future, and the 99 percent will always be in their thrall.

Adams wrote that “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families…as a SNOW ball grows as it rolls.” Thereby, we have an inherited or wealth-based aristocracy which makes the decisions which rule the lives of the less-affluent. Adams defined the “Five Pillars” of this aristocracy as “Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius, and Virtues” with any of the first three overwhelming the other two at any time.

Jefferson contested Adams characterization of aristocracy. He believed that the artificial aristocracy that was “founded on wealth and birth” could be supplanted by a “natural aristocracy among men” based on “virtue and talent.” Wasn’t the American republic the result of the triumph of virtue and talent over wealth? Weren’t the founders fathers -- men who offered “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” for a political ideal -- the very emblem of an aristocracy based on virtue and talent? He conceded that the nations of Europe with their history of an inherited aristocracy limited the economic opportunities of the populous, but argued that in the United States labor and education could raise any one up to a position of prominence.

In separate correspondence, Adams noted the irony of this philosophical argument with Jefferson. Adams was the son of a New England farmer and shoemaker, while Jefferson owned about 200 slaves and 10,000 acres of land – much of it inherited from his father-in-law. Both were elected to the presidency on the basis of their revolutionary credentials – not on their accumulation of wealth and power.  

Jefferson and Adams stood in the one percent of talent and virtue. The nation was birthed and endured because of the character of its founders. If they had craved only wealth and power, the republic would have foundered. Can our nation stand on the character of our current one percent? Will the 99 percent always lose to the will of the aristocracy? Will the virtuous and talented ever supplant the wealthy? 

The answers depend on the character and labors of the 99 percent. The “founding brothers” defined the republic, but it is the American people, the 99 percent, who maintain the freedoms outlined in the Declaration of Independence. If we want “equality and justice for all” we must work for and be worthy of it.

(All quotations from Joseph Ellis’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Founding Brothers.)