Can you create an entertaining and/or dramatic allegory which describes Fluther's social milieu?
After being away from Fluther for an extended period and then returning, many of the elements of Fluther and its denizens struck me as being familiar. After some pondering, I realized that it strikes me the same way as I remember middle school.
One has the classes—the questions and answers of Fluther—which are supposed to be the meat and potatoes of the middle school experience, but inevitably it is not my classes which I remember thirty years later. Instead, it is the vicious and Darwinian social politics which looms large in my memory… and here on Fluther.
As with Fluther, my middle school experience began with a sort of feeling-out by the cool kids, the “in” crowd. Did I hold the right opinions? Did my parents earn the right income? Did I belong to the right school clubs? Or worse, did I belong to the wrong school clubs, like chess or debate. Slowly, one by one, the cool kids decided that I was not cool. My position dipped lower and lower in the social stratum, free-falling past the secondary and tertiary tiers of “coolness,” past first the rich kids, then the jocks, then the stoners.
As with Fluther, I would not assimilate. Unlike the others whose uncoolness had squeezed them out like a lemon seed from wet fingers, I would not hide meekly and try not to attract attention. I went to war and flew my freak flag at high mast. I remember the fury my resistance incited in middle school. How dare I assert my dominance without a loyal pack of hounds at my heels! I must be some sort of rogue, a deranged and dysfunctional animal which did not understand that it must show submission when confronted with superior force; an animal which must be driven from the hunting grounds lest, in its insanity, it harm a valued member of the pack.
The teachers—the Fluther mods and admin—did not like me. I created problems by always needing to be the “special case.” They were forced to be frostily correct, since they could not be seen to be partial, but where they had sufficient latitude to choose for or against me, the decision was inevitably against. That was fine, I knew how to deal with that too. I could walk the line just this side of the rules, never giving the administration the justification they needed to remove me entirely from their chalkboard jungle.
Decades later, the biting-on-tinfoil contrariness and defiance in the face of social, official, and economic authority would serve me well in my career as a radical anarchist union organizer and professional shit-disturber. And I knew, always, that when I planted my feet on Roland’s bridge of defiance and refused to allow Rodomont’s hordes to pass, that many eyes watched with interest; that the many who also did not pass the muster of social acceptance, but who could not find it in themselves to stand alone against the powerful elite, were given food for thought—and perhaps the seeds of some future defiance of their own.
How about you folks? Can you create an allegorical narrative about Fluther and your own experiences here?
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