Analysis:
It's a sad fact that the issues talked about in Emily White's, High School's Secret Life, plague many schools around the country. Fortunately enough the high school I attended was not like the one described in the article. But it is easy to see how something as simple as lunch can make an enormous impact on a person's life and alter their self-esteem. As described in the article their is a girl who has many friends but her fate soon changes when she is assigned second lunch and all of her friends are assigned third lunch. The girl who was once seen as normal and fairly popular was now being displayed as an outcast and a loner, just because she was left alone in second lunch. How could something so minuscule and harmless as school lunch dramatically change how people look at her, and more importantly how she looks at herself? It is these unnoticeable and nearly impossible to predict instances which push many teenagers into a depression, and push others to the brink of suicide. It is not easy to find a solution to this problem but it is really easy to identify what causes it. The stigma of being popular and adhering to the strict code of the status quo is what drives most teenagers to dress a certain way and act in a certain manner. If you ask any teenager today what they would do for a hundred dollars they will instantly list off various different tasks, if you ask them what they would do for one dollar their list magically vanishes. The sad part is we treat people just the same way, we bow to the feet of those who seem superior, while also writing off those who we look down on, treating them as if they were only worth a dollar.
