Mostly just a visceral version of the effects I described. It was a really surreal day (although I didn't even know that word back then) - if the people in authority (teachers) could arbitrarily define who was "good" and who was "bad" (especially the flip-flop during lunch) then those terms don't mean anything deep, just the likes and dislikes of the people in charge. And since all of us followed along in large part with barely any questioning, that just because "everybody else" thought something was good/right doesn't mean it was, may actually mean it wasn't.Originally Posted by kpaske
For example, as a kid I never understood all those commercials on tv that would proudly proclaim their product as being the most popular or the highest selling, or most preferred brand of whatever product it was. Seemed to me that would be a prime reason to avoid the brand - or at best neutral.
In retrospect my experience during "blue collar day" was probably a big reason I saw things that way since I had experienced just how easily people (well kids, but they were regular people to me since I was a kid too) could be convinced en masse to believe and do whatever they were told.
I remember from the discussion after the collars came off that the teachers were interested in focusing on prejudice and ethnic discrimination and how arbitrary it was, we might have been talking about south africa in social studies at the time. In Hawaii (where I grew up) ethnic discrimination is a whole different kind of thing than it is here on the mainland - a lot more complex and definitely not "black & white" or even "brown & white" like it has become here on the mainland. So I'd already had enough experience on the short-end of the racial stick that the discrimination focus wasn't anything special - getting the crap beat out of me after school just for being haole had already taught me that particular lesson.
FWIW, I misspoke earlier, it was 4th grade, not 3rd.
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