"The tyranny of The Rat Race is not yet final"...I hope you're right, Hunter.
Today was Field Day at my high school. For those of you who don't know, basically this is an excuse to make the entire student body wear corny costumes and facepaint, stuff them all into the gym, and let them scream at each other and run around in Organized Activities that scratch the border of Mass Anarchy. It should also be known that, traditionally, the senior class always wins. It's rigged that way; the one year a senior class lost, I hear there were almost riots.
So, jumping to the less distant past, my entire grade and I stood on bleachers for half the day, wearing butcher paper Monopoly-Man costumes (complete with paper canes that functioned both as dueling swords and javelins thrown at the Junior class.) We were actually losing until about halfway through: down ten points or so, which is of course unspeakable. Luckily, the judges had simultaneous changes of hearts and began docking points from our opponents on charges of "sort-of-disorderly conduct" or "didn't pass the last cone at a complete 180 degree angle in the tricycle race." Similarly, the scorekeepers had a buttery elbow or two among them, which attributed to the occasional doubling of our points....
"I love being on the right side of weighted scales," said the girl next to me. The senior bleachers cheered and mosh-pitted in response, and when we won by a satisfactory margin, they cheered and mosh-pitted a little more.
High school guys smell really bad after they've played tug-of-war.
Tonight's the homecoming game, against one of those little backwater-hick schools that should theoretically have not a Radical Third Party's chance against the vested powers of White Suburbia in all its glory; yet it has beaten us every time we've met on the field. I'm going to go--I'm interested to see if the American WASP supremacy will indeed conquer, as it seems to have historically.
Ooh! Historical Trend o' the Day! Are you ready for this? [/ran-DOM!]
Every class that Rouse teaches plays a specific game at some point in its course. Basically, Rouse stands at the front of the room with a box of pennies, tells the class that they represent every bit of capital existing in the world, then dumps them on the ground and steps out of the way. As can be imagined, the entire class leaps upon the pennies, and whoever is either the quickest or greediest ends up with the most. (Last year when I played this, I was able to grab no less than 25% of all the world's capital--the most of any student, thus proving my capitalistic prowess.) After the chaos levels have reached a manageable point, Rouse has everyone in the class count up their pennies. Obviously, there's a great stratification: a few students will have a handful or so, a few more have some middling single-digit number, and the majority has none. Rouse tells the class how the number of pennies you hold at the end of the game will determine a project grade, and then offers a choice: the class could either become communist (ie, pennies are distributed equally), or capitalist (everyone keeps their pennies.) This is decided by a vote, in which each penny a person holds is equal to one vote. So, of course, those with few pennies vote for communism, and those with many pennies vote for capitalism. There is, however, always some rich student who feels bad and votes with the poor communists - I was this person when I played, and it was my votes that swung the winning side. In all the years Rouse has incited this game, communism always won out, and the pennies (and thereby grades) were always distributed equally among the students...
...except for this year. Rouse's students, for the first time ever, voted to remain capitalist this year. Screw the poor.
I'm sorry, but that really frightens me.
On that note, it is now time for me to go spend some of my $20/week allowance money--money that comes from my well-off and semi-high-ranking Lockheed Martin employee of a father who on occasion requires me to squirt Windex at bathroom mirrors for it--on mass-produced food products and admission to watch my male peers smash into each other's $500 uniforms and sweatshirts that prove my support of their sadistic tendancies, all of which were of course manufactured by factory-orphaned Asian children who go blind at the age of five and die of starvation two years later for a 25-cents/hour wage
So, jumping to the less distant past, my entire grade and I stood on bleachers for half the day, wearing butcher paper Monopoly-Man costumes (complete with paper canes that functioned both as dueling swords and javelins thrown at the Junior class.) We were actually losing until about halfway through: down ten points or so, which is of course unspeakable. Luckily, the judges had simultaneous changes of hearts and began docking points from our opponents on charges of "sort-of-disorderly conduct" or "didn't pass the last cone at a complete 180 degree angle in the tricycle race." Similarly, the scorekeepers had a buttery elbow or two among them, which attributed to the occasional doubling of our points....
"I love being on the right side of weighted scales," said the girl next to me. The senior bleachers cheered and mosh-pitted in response, and when we won by a satisfactory margin, they cheered and mosh-pitted a little more.
High school guys smell really bad after they've played tug-of-war.
Tonight's the homecoming game, against one of those little backwater-hick schools that should theoretically have not a Radical Third Party's chance against the vested powers of White Suburbia in all its glory; yet it has beaten us every time we've met on the field. I'm going to go--I'm interested to see if the American WASP supremacy will indeed conquer, as it seems to have historically.
Ooh! Historical Trend o' the Day! Are you ready for this? [/ran-DOM!]
Every class that Rouse teaches plays a specific game at some point in its course. Basically, Rouse stands at the front of the room with a box of pennies, tells the class that they represent every bit of capital existing in the world, then dumps them on the ground and steps out of the way. As can be imagined, the entire class leaps upon the pennies, and whoever is either the quickest or greediest ends up with the most. (Last year when I played this, I was able to grab no less than 25% of all the world's capital--the most of any student, thus proving my capitalistic prowess.) After the chaos levels have reached a manageable point, Rouse has everyone in the class count up their pennies. Obviously, there's a great stratification: a few students will have a handful or so, a few more have some middling single-digit number, and the majority has none. Rouse tells the class how the number of pennies you hold at the end of the game will determine a project grade, and then offers a choice: the class could either become communist (ie, pennies are distributed equally), or capitalist (everyone keeps their pennies.) This is decided by a vote, in which each penny a person holds is equal to one vote. So, of course, those with few pennies vote for communism, and those with many pennies vote for capitalism. There is, however, always some rich student who feels bad and votes with the poor communists - I was this person when I played, and it was my votes that swung the winning side. In all the years Rouse has incited this game, communism always won out, and the pennies (and thereby grades) were always distributed equally among the students...
...except for this year. Rouse's students, for the first time ever, voted to remain capitalist this year. Screw the poor.
I'm sorry, but that really frightens me.
On that note, it is now time for me to go spend some of my $20/week allowance money--money that comes from my well-off and semi-high-ranking Lockheed Martin employee of a father who on occasion requires me to squirt Windex at bathroom mirrors for it--on mass-produced food products and admission to watch my male peers smash into each other's $500 uniforms and sweatshirts that prove my support of their sadistic tendancies, all of which were of course manufactured by factory-orphaned Asian children who go blind at the age of five and die of starvation two years later for a 25-cents/hour wage