Bus seating

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear it moan,
'Cause nobody
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
- Maya Angelou

Yeah, so, I hate to admit this. When I was younger (much younger), they introduced the idea of the Civil Rights Movement by talking about Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts. After overcoming the first hurdle of why people were treating other people differently based on looks/race, I still had one more hurdle. I should preface the hurdle with this- I took the bus to school. And on the bus, there was a definite heirarchy in the seating of children. Cool kids and/or older kids got to sit in the back of the bus. Teacher's pets sat in the front of the bus. Now, by "teacher's pets," I do not limit the population to children toward whom teacher showed any favoritism, but also those over-achievers, kids who asked if they could have extra homework, or if the teacher had forgotten assigning anything, they would be so helpful as to remind the teacher, and that kid who just HAD to be the line-leader. And at that point in my academic career, I was not a teacher's pet. That really didn't come until college, and by then if the teacher liked you, it didn't seem to hold the same connotation. I mean, in college, I had beers with my mechanical engineering professor (oddly, not my major/degree by a longshot, but that's another story). By now (I realize I'm long-winded), you've probably figured out my hurdle.

As a child, my experience taught me that cool people sat in the back of the bus. And then there's Ms. Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus... African Americans didn't want to be cool? What a ridiculous notion! Everyone wants to be cool. Ah, but the literacy rate with Black people was lower than White people. Black people were not given the same opportunities in school, if they even went to school, and when they did go to school it wasn't as nice as the White-segregated school. (Since I went to Catholic School, I assumed it was similar to the difference between Catholic vs. Public School. But I digress.) So, eventually, I came to the conclusion that African Americans wanted to sit at the front of the bus because they had been denied adequate education for years upon years, and to catch up, they figured they needed to have as many teacher's pets as possible.

Oddly enough, I take the bus to the metro to commute to work these days. And, I absolutely hate sitting in the front. I think I still have the school bus seating heirarchy ingrained in my head.