From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 19:19:34 MDT
Did you really escape from the attitudes you ascribe
to "those" people?
I think so. I have noticed that to describe evil is
often taken as being a part of it - by those who like
to pretend that things are nicer than they really are.
Armuchee H.S. was given the opportunity of choosing
students for the Georgia Governor's Honors Program,
which started in 1963-64. Altho my grades easily
qualified me, my contempt for the school - where
bullies prowled the halls looking for people
(especially serious students) to punch in the face and
the biology teacher (also the consistently loosing
football coach) thought that chickens became pregnant
from eating the same seed as the roosters (he also
dismissed evolution, because "who ever heard of a
blackbird mating with a bluebird.") - meant that I was
not even considered.
Agriculture was a required subject.
A year later, at East Rome H.S., I qualified for the
Governor's Honors Program in both chemistry and
English, which meant that I got to spend the summer at
Wesleyan (sp?) College in Macon, with college
professors chosen for being exceptional in their
fields, together with the top 400 other public HS
sophomores and juniors from the state in every field
(except, I think, athletics).
When I got back to Rome, the Armuchee area, I
discovered that most of my Armuchee friends had gotten
cars and done all the things that juvenile males of
that age and milleau in Armuchee did when they got
wheels, which, from their excited descriptions, meant
going into the black (not the word they used)
neighborhoods and egging the cars, getting into
fights, beating up local black kids, having sex,
getting drunk (drugs were as yet unknown in the Rome
area), etc. One of them had managed to kill himself
in his car. They felt really sorry for me having such
a boring summer.
The sad thing was that most of the kids from my
elementary school had all the right attitudes and a
good start. For a public school it had done a fine
job, mainly because the parents - like mine - were
mostly Yankees brought in to man the GE Medium
Transformer plant. They were appropriately appalled
at the kulture in the area, which was only a grade or
so above that depicted in "Deliverance," and strove
mightily thru the PTA, etc., to make that school
excell. A lot of my friends were reading college
texts on engineering in the 7th or 8th grades.
Then they went on to Armuchee H.S., where within a
couple of years most of them completely lost interest
and gave up on any dreams. One guy who I had always
considered smarter than me in elementary school ended
up as a tire changer. Another guy who was an avid SF
reader in elementary school took up a career
delivering appliances.
I really hope that I escaped from there...
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