Do you remember those posters/books?  They had a lot of variations.  I remember there was one that hung in a classroom of mine that said, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”.  I remember it annoying me because I was probably in the fourth or fifth grade and while I agreed with most of the things written on the poster, I did not like the notion that life was so simple and elementary.  How could a kindergartener know everything?  

Looking back, I think I get it.

There are two vivid incidents from my elementary school years that are deeply ingrained into my mind.

The first incident relates to trust.  This is such a silly story but it still rings true for me today.  I remember there was this girl who was in love with one of the boys in my class.  She truly adored him and made it known to him on several occasions and he always rejected her in an uncaring way.  I don’t know why but one day I approached the boy and told him that he should say out loud that he loved her.  Instead of refusing, which I wholly expected him to do, he said, “I’ll say it if you say that you love _____.”  I don’t remember the name but I remember that he said the name of a boy who had curly red hair and was notorious for eating his boogers.  He said it in a way that suggested he didn’t think I would ever say it and I was going through a “prove them wrong!” phase so I quickly agreed.  I notified my friends of this great happening and with a small group of witnesses I said, “I love _____.”  I looked expectantly at the boy to comply with his end of the bargain.  He burst out into laughter and said, “I’m not gonna say it!”  That is the precise moment that it dawned on me that while we have police that are supposed to keep us safe and a complicated court system that is supposed to keep things fair, there are some things, such as a private promise or commitment between people, that cannot be trusted.  There are people in this world that will try their hardest to live with integrity and there are people who will get by and possibly ahead by taking advantage of people who are trying hard to live with integrity.  I think I was meant to be a trusting person so my heart is always inching itself out there but my mind is super suspicious and is constantly preparing myself for the worst.

The second incident relates to power.  In fifth grade I was on the Yearbook committee and when the time came to choose a Yearbook cover, I boldly suggested that we should put it to a class vote.  Well that’s not the bold part.  The bold part is that there were 4 or 5 stock covers that were available from the Yearbook company we contracted with and I suggested that I could draw a cover and include it in the options to be voted on.  I painstakingly hand-drew a cover with the name of the school with block letters and kids doing various things around the block letters.  I misspelled elementary as “elementry” and even still, my cover was voted by the majority to be the Yearbook cover.  Instead of redrawing the entire cover, I taped a piece of paper over the misspelled part so that I could add extra letters.  It was close to the edge of the paper so the “tary” in “elementary” was sort of squished.  It looked terrible.  Fast forward to a few weeks after school when I picked up my copy of the Yearbook.  Instead of the cover I drew, there was one of the generic stock covers that did not win the class vote.  It was of a super messy room, with pizza and books and clothes scattered all over the cover.  It looked way better than the cover that I drew and I knew it.  I never said anything about it to anyone and I don’t think any of my peers noticed or remembered.  I learned from a pretty young age that a vote doesn’t always mean a true democracy, you should realize where true decision-making power lies, people don’t always pay attention to outcomes once they feel that they’ve had a say, sometimes the powers that be can make a better choice than what the majority votes for.  I know that last one sounds awfully socialist… I don’t mean it to be.  I guess a better way to say it is that people don’t always vote what’s best.