High-school scars inescapable

By David Wonpu

Along with going to the dentist and movies directed by Michael Bay, high school is widely believed to be the most painful time in the average individual's life. The scars inflicted by those four years often end relationships, start drinking addictions, and, in some rare cases, perpetuate feuds rooted in the social tragedies of those four years.

We spend the rest of our lives trying to forget the cold hard truths we first learned in high school. But we cannot escape the fact that success is achieved according to the rules of a ruthless Darwinism: beautiful people win, rich people win, and beautiful rich people own the world.

It's the way of the world. In general, those who start out with more finish with much more than they had to begin with. And those who start out with a little finish with only a little bit more. It's an exponential growth that has nothing to do with the work ethic or inherent dignity of those involved. Everything about someone's life, from what schools they attended to what kind of baby food they ate, determines their potential handicap in the 18-hole course of life.

If you want to get anywhere or do anything, you must act a certain part, regardless of what your faux-radical, Green Party roommate might tell you. Some call it "the man" or "the system," and the act of participating in that system is called "selling out."

And maybe that's what it amounts to. However, the fact remains that there's a paradigm which is difficult -- if not totally impossible -- to break away from.

So much of life amounts to playing catch-up, especially if you're someone that society labels a "have-not." If you're a "have," it's important to make sure the have-nots never become like you. You began life with an intimate familiarity of the system, and preserving the constructs of that system is of vital importance. Starting off with more is the only way to guarantee you'll finish with more.

What this means is that the jock who dated your half-Korean cheerleader crush in high school will not stop there. He will continue, for the rest of his life and yours, to be the person you wish you were but will never be.

During college, he will be able to get better grades than you, in addition to partying more. He will also get more job offers than you, from bigger and better companies with higher starting salaries. While you're worrying about whether or not you can pay off half of your loans by the time 2050 rolls around, he'll graduate without owing Chase a dime.

After college, he will become your boss and be promoted in the same time it takes you to figure out where the parking garage is. And yes, when all is said and done, there is a chance he will become the President of the United States, while you remain just another taxpayer.

The thing is, you won't challenge him. You won't ever ensure that he actually has to work for what he has. Because you want to be him. And so you will spend the rest of your life working for him and being his lackey because you are blinded by the possibility of getting just a little piece of what he has.

This is why we try so hard to forget about high school. We treat those four years of our lives, the utterly disappointing abyss that they were, as if they never happened. We repress the memory, because it's just too arduous and trying a task to actually deal with the truth of our place within the so-called "system."

That's why high school is so painful. As much as we try to relegate it to the furthest recesses of our psyche, the real truth of high school is that it didn't stop when we graduated. It never stops. High school perpetuates, on larger scales with higher stakes, for the rest of our lives. It just hurts too much to see it.

David Wonpu is a junior accounting major.