When I attended Liberty High School (LHS) in Bedford, Virginia, I used to eat my lunch with several of my friends and acquaintances. When the weather was nice, we preferred to gather outside. The LHS cafeteria had two large indoor eating spaces, and out front there was a patio that ran the width of the building with a number of white-painted concrete tables and benches. We would gather near the north-eastern side, overlooking the Math and Science building, to eat stale chicken nuggets and talk about our classes, our relationships, our faiths, our political opinions, and whatever else came up.
During one sunny lunch period when I was in my sophomore (tenth grade) year, we heard a commotion at the other end of the patio. Off at the opposite side, the south-western part that overlooked one of the two main academic buildings, two kids had gotten into an argument. I have no idea what they were arguing about. Even if I had been able to hear them, I doubt I would have known (or cared) what had gotten them so mad at one another. They were big, athletic guys who had few interests in common with me (or anybody I ate lunch with, for that matter). Their argument escalated into a food fight. One threw his chicken nuggets at the other. There was a retaliation. Soon, countless high-quality American school lunches had been hurled across the patio and ten or fifteen big, athletic jocks were covered in ketchup, milk, and little bits of cardboard pizza and moldy cole-slaw.
Teachers and assistant principals and other officials were there in moments, ordering the jocks to the office and summoning the cleaning staff to come sweep up the detritus that was left behind. Those of us who were watching from the sidelines went back to eating our lunches and discussing what girls we were going to ask to Homecoming and whether President Bill Clinton’s military intervention in Kosovo was justified. Life went on. In a sane world, that would have been the end of it for us. But it was not to be.
The next morning, I sat in my first-period English class and watched our school’s closed-circuit television program: Minuteman News. I would co-host the program myself the following year, but at this point I was just a member of the audience—one of the few who actually watched it attentively. Nestled-in among announcements for club meetings and pep-rallies was a bombshell: students were now prohibited from eating on the cafeteria patio. Because two jocks had gotten into a food fight, and some of their friends had joined in, everybody who preferred to eat outside now had to move indoors—even those of us who were nowhere near the fight, had no idea what it was about, and hadn’t been involved.
Read more . . .
