A Cinco de Mayo Message to the World

What does Cinco de Mayo mean to you?

As someone who doesn’t have much of a taste for margaritas, the only real association I have with it is a dreary school bus ride I took in 2000.

It was a Friday, the last time that week I would hike up to the bus stop and sit, with maybe 20 or 30 other kids for the 15-minute ride. It was basically a straight shot once we hit Watkins Mill Road, until we got to the intersection with Apple Ridge Road, where we’d make a left and head onto campus.

The sign pictured below indicated that you were entering the world of American high school.

They have really upped their lawn care game.

On that day, though, looking outside the window as we rolled up the hill, I saw a huge sign plastered over that familiar sight:

There was no Canva back then, so the real thing had more hand-drawn charm.

The whole of the space was appropriated to send one message to one person.

Well…maybe more than one.

In Going Postal by Mark Ames, the author argues that the all-too-predictable stories of workplace and school shootings in the US all have a common cause: post-Reagan socioeconomic outcomes. Regarding schools, Ames avers that these institutions, from their architecture to lighting to social hierarchies, serve as training grounds for a stunted and miserable adulthood.

On a fundamental level, the level of human relations, we are finally recognizing that the office world and the school world share a horrible trait: rampant bullying, in which the bullies are the winners. And, they share another awful trait: life in each setting is only wonderful for a very small elite — for executives and shareholders in the adult world, and for popular kids with happy home lives and bright futures in the school world. Meanwhile, life is a wretched time for many , if not most. (Going Postal, 181)

The “Lauren” in question actually didn’t have a happy home life, as she revealed during a tearful speech in Honors English class that same year. Still, Ames’ analysis rings true, especially considering the alienation that many students feel during their four years under the fluorescent lights.

Our graduation ceremony wasn’t held at school but in Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. There were a number of speakers before the actual diplomas were handed out. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend told a story about making bricks out of poop with her bare hands (“no lumps!”) while administrators from the county and maybe even state spoke. Things were more down to earth once our valedictorian took the podium.

The actual valedictorian suggested that we give more credit and appreciation to our teachers. He did not wear a bow tie.

I had spoken to him a few times over the years. He was the kind of egghead who was definitely smarter than your average teen and knew it. I remember once baiting him by asking why he was taking physics — did he want to become a physician?

“A physicist, dumb ass” he replied.

Nice kid.

The principal, a woman who had only been with us for 2 years, gave her speech last. She used grandiloquent terms to illustrate an uncomfortable fact about the class of 2002: our final school year began with 9/11. She said something about how our innocence was taken in a flash that morning, seeming not to realize that our first school year featured the Columbine High massacre.

After finishing these generic remarks, she began the weirdest but most memorable part of the whole ceremony: she told a bunch of inside jokes about a number of the graduating seniors. By definition, only the administrator, the student in question, and maybe their friends would have any idea what she was talking about, in a hall with maybe a thousand people inside. Some of the jokes suggested petty misbehavior while others suggested near-misses with the law.

All in good fun.

Bourgeois boys will be boys.

I was seated among kids I had never before spoken to or even seen, save for during the rehearsal. The fact that we weren’t such an intimate part of this final speech sank in to me as each “joke” was told. Who were these people? How had they been so close to the principal, a woman I don’t think I’d ever said more than “Hi,” to? Had she ever made an effort to get to know the Johnsons I sat by?

Finally, she finished, naming the Salutatorian her “hero.”

Ames cites a scholar from Educators for Social Responsibility who says about high school:

The winners are a smaller group than we’d like to think, and high school life is very different for those who experience it as the losers. They become part of the invisible middle and suffer in silence, alienated and without any real connection

Indeed, it is from that “invisible middle” that many school shooters emerge, students who want to destroy the institution that made them feel unseen and powerless.

Later in the book, Ames chronicles the extreme levels of academic competition that children are subjected to, stressing them out and leading them to cheat or work themselves to exhaustion. They can also snap and hatch a bomb or shooting plot.

You know who else was a took advanced classes?

Reagan-era filmmaking reflected this trend: John Hughes movies portrayed the teenage years as light and fun, but the genre had trasformed by the end of the decade with Heathers, a darkly comedic and homicidal film.

No notes on their fashion choices.

Sitting in Constitution Hall, surrounded by strangers, shrouded in black graduation robes, it was clear to me once and for all that this place — this experience — wasn’t for me.

It wasn’t for another two years until America got a film that showed that there was a way out of the hell of high school. The key was not to conform to it, not to lash out at it — but to transcend it.

That’s the best part of high school: when you leave it.