I was in elementary school when figured out that the men who showed up on the television for presidential elections were big trouble.

This was it! Election night. Only two more weeks to wait while everybody, who had talked for months about nothing else, talked some more about why so-and-so won, and why the other guy didn’t, and so on. Two more weeks and we would get the good stuff back on the television.

I developed further appreciation for politics in sixth grade, when some brilliant academician decided that, since it was an election year, this was an ideal opportunity to impress our system of government upon our young minds. We had real pretend caucuses (I still don’t know what those are all about), real pretend polls, and real pretend voting on a real antique voting machine the school had somehow acquired. We even had real pretend rallies.

To this day I can’t watch rallies on television, much less attend one. I know what happens at those things. Somebody’s gonna get beat up.

Really. I know this. And because I’m getting rather attached to all of you, I’m going tell you why so you will NEVER attend one of these things, thereby remaining un-beaned.

Sixth grade is the year of joining. You have had five years of school to learn why you don’t go against the flow. This is the year when I realized that I had been studying a career choice. I wanted to be playground monitor when I grew up, because it has to be the easiest job anyone ever got paid for. You stand around for 10 to 30 minutes staring at anything but the screaming yuppie larvae terrorizing each other on two acres of crab-grass and blacktop.

If your attention cannot possibly stay trained on the mating habits of starlings, or on the botanical importance prominent in the universe, and if you have no alternative but to respond to some situation, it’s still a no-brainer.

Just take the loser to the principal’s office; they are obviously a weenie, and won’t cause you any trouble. You have done your job. You pried the big kid off the little kid – amid cheers of the feral masses – and asked who started it.

Anyway, by the sixth grade we are supposed to know how to go with the flow. Well, I was a slow learner. And confused. I was sure the teacher and my parents meant all this patriotic pride business.

So when Shelly Steen – sporting a piece of fence with a Republican campaign poster stapled to it – asked me what ticket my parents were voting, I answered her quite proudly: American Independent.

I didn’t recognize the zealousness that Shelly Steen had until high school, when we were watching a film on Adolf Hitler. I used to feel sorry for her because, although she was she was probably the richest girl in school, she was really skinny and she had to wear gold – yes, gold – wigs, because something had happened to her hair. Before you sympathize, however – hair, or no hair – Shelly Steen was a snot.

Shelly proceeded to relate, to the collective group of three sixth-grade homerooms, how I must have confused American Independent with American Indian (heritage cannot be hidden in the sixth grade), and obviously so had my parents.

Didn’t I know that Geronimo wasn’t running for president? Certainly my mother wasn’t going to vote that way, because she was white, wasn’t she? Shelly reasoned to all that my dad was probably making all of us vote that way, and that there were a few other things that could be said about this kind of dummy stuff – that I wasn’t following anyway – which probably proved her point, but I really wasn’t listening.

I just kept looking at that wig (so I wouldn’t have to look at everybody looking at me), all the time thinking how much I’d love to snatch that bad boy right off her pointy little head. But I didn’t.

Don’t nominate me for a Nobel Peace Prize. I didn’t because I was one of the no-trouble weenies that all the playground monitors loved. So I did what little I could think of. I said something really sixth-grade-ish.

“Yeah?” I said.

And since I didn’t think that was quite scathing enough, I continued. I told her that she probably just thought Republican meant something about puberty (which we had learned about in detail the year before, and had been nervously tittering about for some time now), and that she was never, EVER, gonna grow anything out front, so she would probably have to buy them, and maybe she could get them at the same place she got her hair.

So what happened, you might ask? Well, what do you think happened? Of course, she did. She took that nasty old Republican picket sign, and she beaned me with it. My mom came and got me from the principal’s office.

What has this got to do with you going to political rallies? Because, and I swear this on my voter registration card, I saw Shelly Steen at a rally on television. It was her, alright. She had her still-skinny back to the camera, but you couldn’t miss that wig. I changed the channel quickly.

If you won’t listen and learn from me, and you just can’t resist the lure of the rally, at least be careful and watch for a gold wig. Because somebody’s gonna get beaned.

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Audrae Jones is a senior in English from Clear Lake.