Watching kids on a Friday night reminds me of struggle to belong

By David McElroy · September 6, 2019

The local high school football stadium is close enough to my house that I can hear the crowds cheer from my back yard on Friday nights in the fall.

I can hear the dispassionate voice of the stadium announcer saying that it’s third down and two yards to go for the Leeds Green Wave at the Elmore County 17 yard line.

I have a powerful emotional reaction to high school football. It was a big deal in the town where I went to high school and I was there for every game. The entire community seemed to be there. The stadium was always packed — and we went all the way to the state championship game during my senior year.

It wasn’t just “them” — the team — rather it was “us.”

It felt as though it was all of us, from the students and teachers all the way to the city business owners and civic leaders. Everybody was there. It was a source of pride. We were part of something bigger than just ourselves.

I’m sitting in McDonald’s late on a Friday evening watching high school kids who have just watched Leeds defeat Elmore County 33-27 — and watching them reminds me what it felt like as a 17-year-old to need to belong.

It’s been busy in here for the last hour or so. The local people are happy. A smattering of visitors from Elmore County seem a little glum as they stop for some food before their drive back home. (I don’t even know where Elmore County is.)

I can’t really identify with these kids. I have little in common with them. But if I squint hard and pretend the time is long ago, I can imagine that it’s my high school peer group — after a game or after church on a Sunday night — gathered around multiple tables and making an obnoxious amount of noise.

There’s a wide variety of teens among the groups I’ve been watching. They’re racially mixed. Some are attractive and some are a bit homely. A couple are still wearing cheerleader uniforms. There’s one guy who seems to be the clown of the group and he loves the spotlight. And a few of the players came in after they had showered and changed clothes.

They all seem to be working so hard to fit in. I can’t even explain that. Maybe I’m just projecting what I unconsciously felt at their age. Their jokes are loud and fairly unfunny, but they all laugh confidently, just as my friends and I did so many years ago when we were their ages and eager to fit in.

We weren’t really what I thought we were at the time. My crowd was mostly other kids from the youth group at First Baptist Church of Jasper. I had been president of the Youth Council for a couple of years. We were the biggest youth group at the biggest church in the county.

We would have thought of ourselves as better than the other kids. The thinking that went into that was complicated and contradictory. We were “good church kids” who had a lot of pride in being good, not mature enough — either as Christians or as human beings — to understand that our pride was sin.

I needed that group.

I had moved to this little town when I was in the eighth grade. Most of my fellow students had been together since elementary school. I was a bigger-city kid who didn’t really fit for awhile. But after a few years, I worked my way into leadership positions and found myself being part of these groups in which I had been the outsider in the beginning.

My identity was tied up in being part of certain groups and positions. I was one of the school’s “smart kids.” I was one of the First Baptist crowd. I was the editor of the school paper. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I craved the attention and approval of my peers.

As I watch these kids tonight, I’m powerfully aware of our need for social belonging and mutual acceptance. Humans have filled that need in various ways throughout history, but few things in the modern era have been as powerful as the sense of belonging that many of us had from being part of a close-knit smaller community.

It’s a testament to the power of that emotional attachment that I still check high school football scores on Friday nights in the fall to see how my old high school did. Even though the school board changed the name of the school — from Walker High to Jasper High — I still care how they did, even though I no longer know anybody connected to the school and have no real connections to the town anymore.

I was happy tonight to note that my Walker Vikings — excuse me, Jasper Vikings now — defeated their rival Dora Bulldogs by a score of 66-0. We’re ranked No. 1 in the state in the 5-A classification and that’s a pretty big deal.

None of that should matter to me, but it still gives me an odd sense of tribal identity to be proud of something which I was a small part of many years ago.

These kids in McDonald’s tonight are loud. They’re a bit obnoxious. Some of them are pretty full of themselves.

They’re just like we were way back when. And I was part of the group — wanting to be liked, wanting to be accepted, wanting to fit in — but telling myself that I didn’t care what anybody thought of me.

Life in human society can be tough, especially for those of us who are determined to live as we believe it’s right to live. Even people like me — who don’t want to live as other people dictate — need to belong.

I don’t want to need other people’s attention or approval, but I do. In many ways, I’m still that insecure 17-year-old who wants to be liked and loved and accepted.

We all need a place — a group, a community, a crowd — where we belong. No matter how old we get.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts