Kairee Luna

   Throughout my years of interaction with friends, family and those that surround me, I have come in contact with people of various classes, races, religions, etc.  Ever since I was young, I took pride in calling Chicago my home.  Although, in reality, I grew up in a southern suburb about 20 minutes from the tall and glorious city, I have always thought of Chicago as my true hometown.  My parents would tell me about how lucky I was to live in such a city because of its great diversity that you can't find in many places.  African-Americans, Mexicans, Italians, Irish, Polish, they were all here.  In fact, my life-long envelopment in these many cultures allowed me to grow up without any racial discrimination.
   My town of Midlothian had always been considered part of the “middle class.”  No one was extremely poor, or extremely wealthy.  However, many nearby towns seemed to have fallen lower or higher than our standards.  High school especially brought awareness of these “higher” and “lower” classes that surrounded us.  Whenever our school team would play against another, we would often compare schools and uniforms.  Regularly, we would find ourselves joking about how poor we were in comparison to such schools as Andrew or other northern suburb schools.  Many times we would have a small gym and dirty “hand-me-down” uniforms while our opponents would have larger, professional looking gyms and new uniforms with their names stitched onto the back.  Sometimes our teams would even get intimidated by the differences in class.  Because the other schools had so much money, we automatically assumed that they would be so much better.  However, we were wrong as we often found our teams going into the state finals and winning some kind of recognition without the help of extra cash.
   I have also seen many changes of classes within my own family.  My mother, growing up with three sisters, never really experienced the “glamorous” life.  She and her sisters had a difficult time escaping from their “low income” lifestyle.  Two were high school dropouts while the other two graduated.  One sister who dropped later became an inspiration as I witnessed her transformation throughout the years.  She was a dropout, a druggie, a single mother, and was going nowhere in life. In time, she realized that she had to fix her ways unless she wanted to end up in prison or on the streets.  Self-motivated,  she enrolled in a community college after being tested on her intelligence to following an ACT test.  She took everyone by surprise when she graduated as valedictorian and got herself a stable job.  Today, after the many hardships, I would consider her “upper-middle” or “higher” class.  She now has a “picturesque” family with a loving husband, three children and a dog.  As these scenarios would prove, “class” is not a permanent status.