Class-ified

One Saturday many, many years ago, a few friends and I were shooting off bottle rockets in a back yard. The seemingly innocuous fun ended when a handful of armed officers fought their way through the bamboo which separated my friend's yard from his neighbors. Midway through a fire safety lecture, one of the more diehard officers glanced down to see what I was conspicuously trying to hide behind my back: four M-80s (the big ones that whistle) tied together with the fuses twisted together to ensure the whole mess fired at more or less the same time. He asked what I was going to do with the beast, and I replied as honestly as I knew how: "I was going to fire it."\nHe paused and stared at me before accusing me of being the hell-raiser in the back of the class who shoots spit balls. Here I was about to blow off my hand, and he's basically forecasting a life of crime and drugs. In reality, as one could probably guessed by my position on the school newspaper, I wasn't exactly the kind to be lured into gang violence and drug pushing.\nThinking back, the officer might have reconsidered his accusations if my high school had instituted stereotype identification tags like those used at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md. According to the Washington Post, the 3,000-student school issued color-coded badges to classify a student as one of 11 "academies" that divide students based on everything from grade to career path to English proficiency.\nThe administrators believe they are promoting a broader sense of community, but the program is being protested by students who don't understand the benefits of pointing out the differences between one another. \n"Self-segregation is already an issue in the student body, and the formal distribution of color-coded IDs has essentially institutionalized the phenomenon," one student said in a school newspaper editorial about the system. \nThe "academies" students sign up for will become the new way to identify stoners, computer gamers, athletes, and Future Farmers of America. It's just a matter of renaming one's identity. The class clowns are dark blue for entrepreneurship, the foreign kid is red and, hilariously enough, the science nerd is virginal white. \nThis is really a system we should be promoting on the national level to help bring back America's lost sense of "community." If everyone wore ID badges with their race, job and income, we could help promote community togetherness -- black airline pilots would hang out at the Forest-Green Lounge while Hispanic accountants kick back at the robin's-egg-blue cafe. Before long, we could start sending "communities" to schools specially designed to meet their personalized needs. \nIf I had been issued an ID badge before the police seized my jury-rigged hand grenade, I could have informed them I was a geeky middle-class suburbanite. Instead of wasting their time on me, the officers could have been tracking down orange drug dealers and purple gang members.