I had pretty ideal rural New England summer camp experiences in elementary school. I learned to swim, canoe, kayak, and even sail. Our sailboat capsized once in a lake but we managed to right it. We played capture the flag, drew pictures, hiked, and sometimes slept in old wooden buildings. At the time I didn’t like it because I just wanted to be home watching TV or playing video games but in retrospect it was probably better for me to be out there. A lot of the kids also didn’t want to be there and took out their frustrations on each other. My closest friend there was the son of a relatively famous lib polysci scholar. He’s now a lawyer at some ghoulish law firm in DC. He liked to talk about how swear words were just words and people shouldn’t take them seriously.
When I was a teenager I was lib-brained enough to go to a summer camp at one of the universities in DC to take a politics class which would supposedly count as college credit (it ultimately didn’t). This was my first extended time away from home. I came from a family of downwardly mobile labor aristocrats (proto-Berners) but found myself in the company of the kids of relatively prosperous petite bourgeois families—rich, educated republicans, soon-to-be frat bros and sorority girls from across the country, not all of whom were white. One bragged about sitting next to Kathryn Harris, who was instrumental in W. stealing the 2000 election, on a flight. They were mostly lazy students and just wanted to party but I didn’t really interact with them very much, even though I had to room with one. I made friends with the nerdier kids who had brought their expensive gaming computers with them. Our teacher looked like a less handsome version of George Clooney and had co-written an incredibly boring lib polysci textbook about the modern Middle East. I got an A in the class after reading and writing a lot about Tunisia even though as a lib I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
The weirdest thing about that camp was being in DC, being warned not to give money to homeless people (no explanation given), and then seeing homeless people everywhere, every single one of whom was Black. The isolated and artificial feeling of the city was pretty profound. I saw a presidential motorcade speeding through the city—black SUVs and police sirens, all traffic stopped, very annoying. I was also there years later at Obama’s inauguration (still a super lib) and saw W. fly away from the White House in a helicopter.
I wonder about what happened to a lot of those kids but I can barely remember any of their names. All I know is that one became a dentist.
I had pretty ideal rural New England summer camp experiences in elementary school. I learned to swim, canoe, kayak, and even sail. Our sailboat capsized once in a lake but we managed to right it. We played capture the flag, drew pictures, hiked, and sometimes slept in old wooden buildings. At the time I didn’t like it because I just wanted to be home watching TV or playing video games but in retrospect it was probably better for me to be out there. A lot of the kids also didn’t want to be there and took out their frustrations on each other. My closest friend there was the son of a relatively famous lib polysci scholar. He’s now a lawyer at some ghoulish law firm in DC. He liked to talk about how swear words were just words and people shouldn’t take them seriously.
When I was a teenager I was lib-brained enough to go to a summer camp at one of the universities in DC to take a politics class which would supposedly count as college credit (it ultimately didn’t). This was my first extended time away from home. I came from a family of downwardly mobile labor aristocrats (proto-Berners) but found myself in the company of the kids of relatively prosperous petite bourgeois families—rich, educated republicans, soon-to-be frat bros and sorority girls from across the country, not all of whom were white. One bragged about sitting next to Kathryn Harris, who was instrumental in W. stealing the 2000 election, on a flight. They were mostly lazy students and just wanted to party but I didn’t really interact with them very much, even though I had to room with one. I made friends with the nerdier kids who had brought their expensive gaming computers with them. Our teacher looked like a less handsome version of George Clooney and had co-written an incredibly boring lib polysci textbook about the modern Middle East. I got an A in the class after reading and writing a lot about Tunisia even though as a lib I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
The weirdest thing about that camp was being in DC, being warned not to give money to homeless people (no explanation given), and then seeing homeless people everywhere, every single one of whom was Black. The isolated and artificial feeling of the city was pretty profound. I saw a presidential motorcade speeding through the city—black SUVs and police sirens, all traffic stopped, very annoying. I was also there years later at Obama’s inauguration (still a super lib) and saw W. fly away from the White House in a helicopter.
I wonder about what happened to a lot of those kids but I can barely remember any of their names. All I know is that one became a dentist.