Martin Luther King Jr. day has me thinking about all the protests in the 1980's when I was in high school.
Man there wasn't a day when we Gen Xer's weren't outraged and marched...what's that? We didn't protest?
Sure we were furious that the school disbanded the appointed smoking section. Well, no I didn't smoke, but for those that WANTED to! Injustice. We didn't protest, but we were mad as hell.
But hold on there. It turns out we did protest in high school, but half of us didn't even know we did until about 25 years later when someone on Facebook posted the article from our high school newspaper.
Let me take you back to what led up to the Homecoming protest.
The school was packed into the bleachers "listening" to our Principal and Vice Principal talk about something.
I DO remember a kid in our class shooting not one, but two bottle rockets at the vice principal. Very dramatic.
I DO remember groaning and eye rolling about having to go back to our classes.
I DO remember the announcement that the Homecoming football game was cancelled, and then later not cancelled, but the dance, yes that was indeed cancelled. The DANCE!
I lived for the school dance.
Dancing up a sweat on a Friday night in our high school gym to songs from Depeche Mode, Dire Straits and A-ha.
A chance to hear my favorite music at a blaring decibel versus the tinny sound from my faux wood GE clock radio.
I guess it made sense. This punishment. Shooting bottle rockets at people, our principals no less, was pretty serious.
But hold on, (this is the 25 years later part) apparently the dance was cancelled because students disobeyed the Principal's orders to leave the pep rally. Not for the bottle rocket incident! Now THAT is a record scratch moment my friends.
"People on a one-to-one basis were resisting my directive to leave the pep rally." -Principal.
"Other students stayed because they didn't know what was going on." - Sophomore
"No one understood what Mr. K wanted us to do."-Senior
This was the general feeling I remember. Certainly not a revolt.
I knew exactly what would clear this up. My journals. I flipped through y notebook pages looking for entries about this so called revolt.
Unfortunately, the only entry on that day was about my boredom in study hall.
"There are 24 lights on in the Commons and 38 lights off. There are 102 curved boards along the wall. There are 4 garbage cans and 7 outlets. Etched into my table: COL BUNN ISARED NECK."
Nothing. No mention of the pep rally, the dance, the revolt.
Apparently there was a "Wear Black on Monday" effort that I had no idea about either!
I'm sure I was preoccupied with studying. Well no, not in Study Hall, but...
Listen, from our high school Facebook group we did hear from the bottle rocket launcher. He was expelled, went to a different high school and made new friends.
I have written about "Kevin" in a previous post. The same Kevin who posted on Facebook about his Beer and Boobs bachelor party tour...We'll have one last story involving Kevin in a later post.
So is it a protest, a revolt, a rallying cry if you didn't even know it happened? I don't know.
What I do know is that I loved high school.
That my hair and drama ran high and no doubt I have the journals to prove it.
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