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    Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast
    Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast
    Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast
    Ebook278 pages4 hours

    Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast

    By Michael Phillips

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    Michael Phillips’ Growing Up Against All Odds is a deeply honest and powerful portrayal of his experiences of severe bullying not only in Junior High School but also in his own family and in work settings. Such “bullyism” is much the same as the racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, ageism--and even “weightism,” “heightism,” “beautyism,” “queerism” and “intelligencism”--that most of us experience from one day to the next. Robert W. Fuller, former President of Oberlin College, had a word for such hierarchical and abusive behavior: RANKISM, as discussed in his books, Somebodies and Nobodies and All Rise. Rankism permeates every single aspect of present-day societies.

    Yet Phillips refuses to fall into the trap of writing a cold, distant and abstract analysis of what happened to him over the years of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. As someone with many journalistic experiences—his first publication, which appeared in a sociology textbook, was written at age 11—he has “fire in the belly.” His passionate portrayals of what he went through impact readers in much the same way that novelists achieve their best results.

    In his final paragraph Phillips writes: “I believe that every single one of us has enormous potential for personal development, including intellectual [“head”] and emotional [“heart”] development along with the ability to solve problems” [“hand”]. He uses this extremely broad “head-heart-hand” approach in responding to his rankist experiences. Instead of buckling under the weight of all that abuse, he was able to move on from those negative experiences to find a career direction as well as to explore what this wonderful country has to offer. He writes about his positive experiences in such sections as “Getting to Know Milwaukee: Festivals and Country Fairs,” “Chicago Neighborhoods, Food and Festivals,” “Minor League Baseball and College Football,” “Exploring the Midwest: State Fairs and Festivals,” “Rediscovering New England,” “Enjoying D.C.,” “Southern Food,” “College Football Southern Style” and “Exploring the Southeast.” By so doing he gives the rest of us a direction for moving from meaningless to meaningful experiences [“head”}, from negative to positive emotions [“heart”], and from powerlessness to a powerful ability to make progress on the problem of rankism [“hand”].

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Phillips
    Release dateAug 5, 2015
    ISBN9781311564634
    Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast
    Author

    Michael Phillips

    Professor Mike Phillips has a BSc in Civil Engineering, an MSc in Environmental Management and a PhD in Coastal Processes and Geomorphology, which he has used in an interdisciplinary way to assess current challenges of living and working on the coast. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research, Innovation, Enterprise and Commercialisation) at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and also leads their Coastal and Marine Research Group. Professor Phillips' research expertise includes coastal processes, morphological change and adaptation to climate change and sea level rise, and this has informed his engagement in the policy arena. He has given many key note speeches, presented at many major international conferences and evaluated various international and national coastal research projects. Consultancy contracts include beach monitoring for the development of the Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay, assessing beach processes and evolution at Fairbourne (one of the case studies in this book), beach replenishment issues, and techniques to monitor underwater sediment movement to inform beach management. Funded interdisciplinary research projects have included adaptation strategies in response to climate change and underwater sensor networks. He has published >100 academic articles and in 2010 organised a session on Coastal Tourism and Climate Change at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in his role as a member of the Climate, Oceans and Security Working Group of the UNEP Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands. He has successfully supervised many PhD students, and as well as research students in his own University, advises PhD students for overseas universities. These currently include the University of KwaZuluNatal, Durban, University of Technology, Mauritius and University of Aveiro, Portugal. Professor Phillips has been a Trustee/Director of the US Coastal Education and Research Foundation (CERF) since 2011 and he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Coastal Research. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, British Columbia and Visiting Professor at the University Centre of the Westfjords. He was an expert advisor for the Portuguese FCT Adaptaria (coastal adaptation to climate change) and Smartparks (planning marine conservation areas) projects and his contributions to coastal and ocean policies included: the Rio +20 World Summit, Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts and Islands; UNESCO; EU Maritime Spatial Planning; and Welsh Government Policy on Marine Aggregate Dredging. Past contributions to research agendas include the German Cluster of Excellence in Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) and the Portuguese Department of Science and Technology.

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      Book preview

      Growing Up Against All Odds - Michael Phillips

      Part Eight: Balancing Working and Playing in Atlanta

      Chapter 43 Moving Down to Atlanta and the Fulton County Job

      Chapter 44 Adjusting to Life in the South

      Chapter 45 Southern Food

      Chapter 46 Meeting People, Minor League Baseball and Food Festivals

      Chapter 47 College Football Southern Style

      Chapter 48 Exploring the Southeast

      Chapter 49 Looking Back

      Chapter 50 Back to the Future

      Part Nine: Connecting the Dots

      Chapter 51 Life Lessons from the Social Sciences:Emotional Development,Vision,Action

      Part One: Introduction

      I knew at a very young age that I was different from other kids growing up in a suburban town in the Boston area in the 1980s. I didn’t talk like them, I didn’t dress like them. I didn’t have the same interests in sports or girls or beer. That made me a bit of an outcast. I didn’t fit neatly into a specific cool school group like the Jocks or the Goths. Instead, I was part of the Outcast group, the Nerds. We were all taunted and teased and made to feel inferior, made to feel like we didn’t belong. Instead of bemoaning our lot in life, however, we tried to embrace our role as school Geeks. At the time, it didn’t really phase or affect us. I was just happy to be part of a group, any group, and felt a certain sense of kinship with the other Outcasts. Beneath the surface, however, I felt a sense of sadness that I wasn’t a cool kid, that I was different and that I was being treated like a freak.

      We all get labels in junior high school and unfortunately those labels can last a lifetime and stay with you. I have always been trying to escape my nerdy past. I look down upon it. I look at pictures of who I was in junior high school and I’m embarrassed. I cringe and get angry when I look at pictures of myself and others in my junior high school yearbooks. Why couldn’t I fit in better? Why did people bully me? Why didn’t I try harder to make friends and to join groups? Why did I just rush home every afternoon on the bus and just sit on the sofa at home and watch Match Game and The Flintstones all night?

      There are no easy answers. Everyone has their own story, their own hurdles to overcome. I look at friends from my own neighborhood that I grew up with. I was close friends with a number of kids down the street. We were all in the same grade and went to the same elementary and junior high school. We spent many afternoons playing street hockey or basketball in the neighborhood after school. We saw each other at the bus stop every day, hung out on weekends, and got to know each other’s families intimately.

      Gradually, however, things began to change over time. We all began to grow apart from one another as the years passed, as each of us began hanging out with different groups of people and getting different labels. One of my friends became a Jock and began hanging out with other Jocks. Three others began to dabble heavily in drugs. In our junior high school in Lexington, Massachusetts, drug addicts were called The Heads. Two of those drug addicts and former friends of mine actually dropped out of school when they got to Lexington High School and I still have not spoken to them since that time.

      I guess, compared to others in my neighborhood, I would be considered normal. But the truth is that I was a geek and I hated that label. I hated being friends with the other geeks and being taunted and bullied by the cool kids in junior high school. To this day, I have trouble coming to grips with the fact that I was labeled a nerd and hung out with all the other school nerds. I have always tried to get beyond my school label but it’s not as easy as I thought it would be.

      This is my story, a story of someone who has spent his whole life trying to escape and get beyond who he was in junior high school. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be. I not only had to deal with being bullied and teased in school for being a nerd, but I had to deal with a home life that was equally dysfunctional, with a father who always worked and didn’t really have time for me. And a mother who was miserable in her own life, and who spent half her time screaming and yelling at my father about how miserable her life was, and spent the rest of her time yelling at me, telling me that I’m no good and that I’ll never amount to anything.

      The same kinds of negative experiences followed me in a series of jobs after college. I brought all of my enthusiasm and hard work to each new position only to be lied to about my prospects for long-term employment and treated like a second-class citizen. Many managers appear to just be out for themselves and trying to cover their own asses and care very little about the well-being of their employees. Not all jobs are like this, but all too many companies have managers playing favorites regardless of the productivity of those favorites and not giving a damn about helping others gain a meaningful work situation. It’s much like the world situation, where the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing.

      A lot of the problem has to do with people’s emotions, such as fear. When I tried to get help from managers I found them either to be too afraid to come to the defense of someone who did not have the best reputation or not wanting to get involved in a sticky situation. This was much the same as what I’d experienced in junior high school, when former friends from elementary school abandoned me rather than stand up for me. It seems that conformity to those with the best reputation is the name of the game, whether in school or at work. Bullying is by no means limited to what happens in schools, for I found it happening at work and in my own family. I found that fear is powerful enough to eliminate decent behavior.

      Yet I found a way out for myself, and perhaps it can also be a way out for others even if it doesn’t succeed in changing the world. It’s a direction that anyone can learn to take. I hit upon it by myself, without making use of the social sciences. But afterwards I discovered that social science knowledge points in the same direction. Of course, it has to do with emotions. It has to do with answering questions like these: How can one learn to cope with a world that emphasizes winners and losers, where most of us have to be losers in order for there to be winners? Is it possible for the individual to find deep meaning in his or her life within this kind of world? What can one do to reduce one’s negative emotions in everyday life, like fear, shame and guilt, and develop positive emotions like confidence, pride and self-acceptance? How can one succeed in enjoying life, given the many problems that stand in our way?

      Part Two: Surviving in Junior High and High School

      CHAPTER 1--BEING DIFFERENT AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

      My story starts in junior high school. Junior high school isn’t a fun time for almost anyone. This is where kids can get labeled as a Jock or a Geek or a Goth or a Head or a Nerd. And these labels can last a lifetime. This can be quite a shock, coming from a neighborhood elementary school where you’re dealing with a much smaller group of kids who don’t know the first thing about labels. In elementary school I didn’t know that I was different from anyone. We all ate lunch together, we all went to recess together, and all of us took the bus together. There were no labels, no putting down of people. We were all too young to understand who we were at that point. Future Goths and Nerds and Jocks were all sitting at the same lunch tables, enjoying each other’s company.

      In junior high, things began to change radically. My junior high school was much bigger than my elementary school, and attracted kids from all over the town of Lexington. That was the first shock for me. I lost many of the friends I had made in elementary school as they met new kids and made new friends. The second thing I noticed was that kids tended to gather together in groups with other kids who had similar interests. While there were no sports teams in my elementary school, there were any number of sports teams you could join at my junior high school, from football to basketball to soccer. I saw how the athletes in our junior high school began to bond with each other and form friendships. Most of the cool, popular kids at my junior high school played sports. This was the way you became popular. I was terrible at sports and had a shot-put motion to my throwing arm that invited derision. I was one of the slowest in my class at the 50-yard dash, which dealt a further blow to my confidence.

      The thing is that I knew I was different than most other kids. I didn’t feel like I was a normal kid who could blend in with others. Most normal kids were interested in making friends and joining school groups like the yearbook or the newspaper. I had no real interest in making friends or spending any extra time at school. The primary reason was the bullying and teasing. It seemed to me that the bullying had started on Day 1 when I walked into junior high school. Looking back, I can see why I was such an easy target. It’s easy to see now, but at the time I wondered why all the kids were picking on me. Now I understand it’s because I was different from everyone else. I was a heavy, pudgy kid who wore thick glasses and spoke with a lisp. Every stereotype that one has of a nerd, I fit to a T.

      The worst teasing related to my voice. I talked differently from every other kid. I had had a speech impediment for many years and was seeing a speech therapist in school to try to correct the problem. It was not a great feeling to have to see a speech therapist while every other kid was going off to class. I felt like a special needs student.

      The kids in school were unrelenting in teasing me about my lisp. They had taken to calling me SchMike (instead of Mike), a phrase that they knew got under my skin. I tried to put up a brave face, but the truth is that each time I heard that name, I began to feel all sorts of emotions: anger, depression, sadness. Why was everyone picking on me? Why were people turning on me? I just wanted to belong, to fit in. Was that too much to ask? And the thing is, everywhere I went, that name followed me around. They called me that name in class, at lunch, on the bus, and everywhere else you could possibly think of, even in my yearbook.

      It wasn’t just random kids turning on me and teasing me in junior high school. Close friends that I had had in elementary school had either began to tease me or wanted nothing to do with me because I had developed such a bad reputation, and they wanted to hang around with cooler kids. I guess this can be considered normal juvenile behavior, but to me at the time it seemed like treason. Who could I count on for support if my own friends wouldn’t back me up in my time of need? I felt so alone. One of my old friends from the neighborhood where I lived actually wrote in my junior high yearbook that it has been somewhat of a detriment to know me.

      If the bullies at school weren’t teasing me about how I talked, they were teasing me about my weight and how I dressed. I’ll admit it’s tough to look back at pictures or video of myself from 30 years ago. I had large man-boobs and had difficulty finding shirts that could cover them up. I often wore bulky shirts and pulled out the slack from my pants in a futile effort to try and cover up the man-boobs. I remember taking some shopping trips with a few friends I had to Marshalls to try and find shirts in a vain effort to make me look presentable at school. It was often an exercise in frustration. I would spend hours trying on shirts, looking at the mirror, and being very unhappy at how I looked. But the fact is that this was just another thing that made me different from every other kid at school, something I was all too keenly aware of.

      I was greatly embarrassed by my man-boobs, more so than any other issue that I had, and it began to have a profound impact on me. I was afraid to take my shirt off in gym class. I didn’t want other kids to see my man-boobs because I knew they would tease me relentlessly if they saw them. Many times, I tried to skip gym altogether by bringing in a doctor’s note or coming up with some lame excuse. Gym was for the jocks, not for people like me who couldn’t run or throw or catch a ball. Unfortunately for me, gym was a required elective in junior high and I had no say in the matter. So I continued to embarrass myself in all types of gym activities, from climbing rope to the 50-yard dash. At least for the most part I had my shirt on, which was the one saving grace.

      The one place in school where I felt comfortable was band. I had started playing the alto saxophone in junior high school as a way to try and strengthen my voice and get rid of my speech impediment. My parents had also hoped that it would allow me to come out of my shell and become more social with kids at school. This move had its desired effect. I gradually got to know other kids in band and made some new friends. To them, I wasn’t SchMike or some geeky kid who wore huge glasses. I was just Mike who played the alto saxophone.

      I wasn’t very good at the saxophone but that wasn’t really the point. I needed the sense of belonging, to feel part of a group. Band was my group, a place where I could turn and feel good about myself. Band was a place where people wouldn’t judge me and turn on me. Band was also a place where I could just be myself and act normal and feel some sense of accomplishment about what I was doing.

      The friends I made in band in junior high school I still have to this day for the most part. That’s how important band was to me. I was able to make lifelong friends who I could talk to every day about school, about sports, about politics and about any other issues that young kids talk about. We would go to the movies at Showcase Cinemas in Woburn or hang out in Harvard Square in Cambridge on the weekends. Or we would go to the Burlington Mall or to the Wal-Lex bowling alley on the Waltham-Lexington line. These people didn’t care if I was a nerd or a target or if I dressed funny. They just took me as a normal kid who they wanted to get to know better. In fact, some of them could have been considered ‘nerds’ themselves. That is the stigma or stereotype that some people have of kids that choose to play in a junior high school band rather than partaking in sporting activities or something a little more masculine.

      Over time, my experiences in the band had a very positive effect on me. I began to focus much less on the bullies who were teasing me and more on my friends in the band. They stuck up for me, they cared for me. They were everything you could think of when you think of a friend. To them I was just a normal kid. They didn’t care about my speech impediment or my man-boobs or my bulky glasses. They were able to look beyond that and see a real person.

      CHAPTER 2--HOME LIFE WITH MOM AND DAD

      While things were getting better at school, home life was a different story. My mother had had a difficult life growing up in New York City. Her father had always been very mean to her and had been a negative influence during her entire adolescence. Nothing she ever did could satisfy him or make him see her in a more positive light.

      My mother’s experiences with her father hardened her at an early age and turned her into a cynical and angry person, traits that she still carries to this day. Her cynicism didn’t reveal itself to me right away. When I was 4, 5 and 6 years old, I remember a relatively happy and benign family life. There was no anger, no fighting. My parents used to take me and my brother on trips all over the world when I was very young, back in the 70’s when travel was easy and affordable. We would go to Japan and Europe and we also went to St. Thomas in the Caribbean Islands every other year, a favorite destination of my parents. I remember a happy, normal family that was living the good life.

      So what changed? Looking back, I think there were a number of factors that contributed to my mother’s eventual change. For one, I think the factor of a job my mother hated, and the sheer drudgery of having to commute there day after day was beginning to wear on her. My mother had taught young kids at different Boston-area school systems for many years, but I think over time the kids’ rambunctiousness began to get to her, and she found that she couldn’t deal with them anymore. She came home from work every night, ranting and raving to my father about how awful the kids were, and how she couldn’t handle them anymore. I would shut the door to my room to try and drown out the screaming, which wasn’t easy. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. And her anger and cynicism were bringing me down as well.

      I began to grow apart from my mother and drew closer to my father, a situation that she greatly resented. I actually kept my distance from both of them. I didn’t really let either of them into my life. I didn’t tell them about the bullying and teasing at school because I was ashamed. Perhaps they could have helped me, perhaps not. But I feared my mother piling on me and telling me I was no good if I told her that I had become a bullying target at school. My mother had a way of making me and my father feel terrible about ourselves if we even showed the slightest sense of vulnerability. If she was miserable, which she often was, she was going to make me and my father miserable as well, and bring us down to her level.

      My distance from my mother and my closeness to my father created a great sense of friction within the family, a fact made harder by the fact that my brother was close to my mother and not nearly as close to my father. This made for some awkward family dinners, and there were many situations where we all ate dinner separately at different times. Outside of mealtime, my brother and mother would hang out and talk a lot because they had similar interests in music and food and the finer things in life. That’s what made her treatment of me stand out so much in my mind. She was a saint to my brother and they never fought and she never put him down. But anything I did always invited constant criticism from her.

      My mother began to target me as well as my father more and more over time, just as her father had done to her. Her job had gotten to her. She couldn’t take the kids, she couldn’t take the commute. She couldn’t take the cold weather in the Boston area or the snow. It was always something that bothered her. The least little thing seemed to set her off. Perhaps my father had forgotten to make her breakfast. Perhaps I had forgotten to put the Boston Globe on the kitchen table in the morning. Everything had to be just right or she would go off on both of us. Both my father and I felt like her servant.

      I began to be so embarrassed by my mother’s behavior and her constant complaining that I didn’t want to have any friends over to my house. I was afraid that my mother might blow up at me or my father or my friend and I couldn’t take that chance. To this day, many of my friends that I keep in touch with from my days in Boston have never seen her and have no idea what she looks like. In high school, when friends would come by to pick me up to go to the mall or the movies, I would meet them by the side of the road. I did not want to risk them walking up to the front of our house and potentially having a chance encounter with my mother. I would talk about her in a negative way to my friends all the time, and they were all dying to meet her, but I held firm in my opinion that she would do something to embarrass me in front of my friends.

      In 1978, my brother graduated from Lexington High School and moved out of our house and off to Cornell University. I had not been particularly close to my brother, mainly because he was closer to my mother and had more in common with her, whereas I bonded much more closely with my father. So when he left our house for good, it didn’t really affect me. I never really opened up to him and vice versa. But my mother took the news far more harshly. My brother had acted as a buffer between my mother and me and my father. He was the one person who would put up with her antics because of their similar interests. They both enjoyed each other’s company. I remember one weekend when we all drove my brother David out to Cornell University to drop him off for college and I remember thinking that things back home were probably going to go from bad to worse. At least my brother had always been there to act as a bit of peacemaker between my mother and me or my mother and father. Now we didn’t have that luxury to fall back on.

      But still it was difficult to adjust without him around. I was only about 11 years old when David left

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