The Jungle

School is a jungle of sorts. We reluctantly simper in on September 1st, sniffing our surroundings and marking our territory. The handsome, athletic males sit on one table in the cafeteria, the skinny geeks sit at another. The beautiful girls get all the attention during lunch, which is compensated by the fact that the not-so-attractive, intelligent girls are endlessly praised during class.

We all have our own area, which we must work to defend viciously. The goths can smoke in your face and hurl obscenities at you if you should choose to pick a fight with them. They are irrevocably cool and trendy, and live a life devoid of rules. The jocks can beat you up or torture you for being inferior to them. They are strong and admired on the field, warriors who fight for the school. The beautiful girls can get to work to tarnishing your name around the school, yet smile at you prettily should you confront them. They are attractive, and they have faces and bodies that make them instantly the object of a person's attention. The geeks, of course, can do little at all in high school - but yet again, they do end up accepted in the prestigious colleges and excell in life later on.

It's all about power, it's all a power struggle in high school; the authority against the students, the students against the students. We all have times in which we feel we are not fit to walk the earth, that we should sink down into the dirt, and yet other times in which we laugh in the face of a struggling peer and exercise our power by reminding them of their inferiority.

Even with the goths, beauty queens, jocks and geeks, there still remains the strong presence of assimilation. Every student, every kid, wishes only to blend into their environment like chameleons. Most would gladly forfeit their identity in exchange for acceptance.

We come to class, every single one of us making an effort. We are not people - we are cattle being shunted from one stable to another. The secretaries never bother to know students by their name, there are simply too many of us; we are just ID numbers to the computer system. 5260, branded and tagged like the animals that we are.

In the end, our entire worth, our entire being is judged in a few bold-faced letters by a stranger we don't even know.

A place of education? All high school is is a menagerie in a zoo, a cage in which the tigers and the monkeys and the rabbits all are force to live together, in an endless, conformist, stifling maze which has no beginning or end.