Popularity Contest
As early as grammar school popularity is a driving force as we conduct a life outside of the home. If we are lucky enough to have caring parents, we assume that other humans will like us as they do. How are we to know that being liked is not an immediate part of growing up. I wanted to be liked in school. Even in grammar school being liked was important. However, it is hard to find the right path to popularity. You can be a great athlete. Even in grade school the kids that were good at sports were generally liked. You could be good-looking or pretty. It is true the pretty girls were always popular. Puts a lot of pressure on them at an early age but they are popular. Good-looking guys were also popular --- good at sports was a big plus. If you were not pretty or good looking you had to find other ways to move your liked quotient up the scale. You could be funny. Making people laugh is always a good way to be popular. There were many hurdles to becoming popular and remaining so. One of the rituals in grammar school was choosing teams. Being picked number one, of course, was the true testament to your athletic ability and your popularity. Number two thru 5 was good, not perfect but you were definitely in the hunt. If it was baseball the popular meter needle really started to get buried after number 5. In baseball, you had nine chances or actually 18, if you weren’t picked by the first team you had a chance at the second team. If both team captains passed on you it was a double blow to your self-esteem. Suffice it to say I got picked because you had to get picked. Waiting for my turn to bat some of the kids thought they would be bullies and played that trick where one kneels behind you and the other pushes you so you stumble and fall. Stung by the idea that I was no better than number 9 I got into a fight with one of these boys after I was humiliated in front of the others as I fell to the ground. I think this might have been number one in a two-bout lifetime fight career. It was an early lesson that plays out in any sport --- the person that retaliates gets the punishment. I received detention and sent home. That wasn’t fun either as It was probably like going to the commissioner’s office. I don’t think Ms. Smith understood the complexities of being in grammar school and struggling to be liked. What was more crushing was the next day? The last day of school and my last day in grammar school as I was moving on to Junior High School. It was recess and I was playing some game with bean bags. In a not well-thought-out demonstration of end-of-school exuberance, I threw one of the bean bags up on the school roof. I claimed it was an accident but Ms. Smith was having none of it. She brought my fellow students into the classroom and said that I had done something disrespectful in throwing the bean bag on the roof. She gave me an opportunity to be contrite but she had already poisoned the well. She then told the class that they would determine what kind of citizenship grade I would receive for the year. The scale was simple enough. “1” was obviously the best, and “5” was citizenship failure. Much to my soon-to-be psychologically damaged self, my classmates all voted to give me a 5 in citizenship. I felt like the gladiator that could not kill the three-legged lion-- thumbs down.
If popularity was not important to me then why is this memory so clear when others have faded. What I remember is the event; what I don’t remember is the people that I thought were so important at the time. I remember my behavior and how unimportant my popularity was after all this time but what is important is how I could have behaved better and thus had a different result. After all of these years, I am rethinking the importance of being popular versus the importance of one’s behavior. Clearly, this event was important to me because I remember it above all of the other days in grammar school. For all of the effort, we put into wanting to be liked by our peers, their importance dwindles and evaporates as time passes. What remains is what we do. What we accomplish, how we treat others, and how we help make the lives of the people better. It really isn’t a popularity contest and when it is, it is soon forgotten. I don’t remember the people but I remember the lesson; what you do in life is what matters not the applause.
Popularity is fraught with conflict and a false premise. We vote for politicians based on some twisted sense of popularity as if they care about the individual. I think that energy could be better directed at kindness to others who are in need rather than those we wish will reciprocate our kindness by affirming our popularity. Popularity is ephemeral. The more people like us the more rewarding our lives will be. What is more likely is that they will forget and so will you. What makes our life better is the goodness we extend to others regardless of whether or not they pick us to be on their team or vote to give us a better grade.