And the Holy Ghost was moving too...

A friend of mine who goes to the University of Iowa and I were talking today. We frequently have little arguments about which part of the country is better (he's from Wisconsin). His argument of choice today was that all of New England was preppies. Preppies who came from money, I believe, to be a little more precise.

After that I made the point that some parts of the Northeast might be rich (in Massachusetts, Sudbury, Weston, most of Connecticut, Westchester County, NY, at least half of Rhose Island), not all of it is. My town runs the gamut in the whole economic status thing. You'll find homeless people downtown, and you'll find the two million-dollar mansions near the Sudbury line.

For me, however, it's somewhere in the middle. I don't come from money. My father earns enough that we can live comfortably where we are, but we wouldn't be able to do so in some other places. My parents didn't come from money. My mother's father worked at a cement plant, and her mother was a teacher. My father's father worked with computers in a small capacity after he immigrated for good. Both of my father's parents had to flee Europe to avoid the Nazis - my grandfather (Opa) because he was in Germany and being actively recruited, and my grandmother (Oma) because she was in Hungary and being actively exterminated.

I'm not here on a full-ride, either. I got a fair amount of financial aid, but I'm not being entirely paid for by the school. My family is having to make changes to afford to send me here. When the lease on my father's Ford Explorer ran out, a year or so ago, he did not lease a new one, as had been the run for several years. Instead, he purchased an old Lincoln Mark VIII with problems in the air-ride that can't be fixed, and a windshield that needed replacing. I've currently got a registration block that I can't resolve immediately because Northeastern screwed up the payment plan my family is working with.

This school used to be different. Very much so, in fact. It used to primarily be a commuter school. That's how it was when both my parents went here in the early '80s. My mother lived on-campus only one semester, choosing instead to commute from Needham each morning, for 8 AMs, no less. My father transferred here from Manhattan College. (Interesting trivia, Manhattan is a Catholic College run almost entirely by friars [monks] of the LaSallian order. The monk that gave his name to the nickname of their sports teams, Brother Jasper, is credited with inventing the Seventh Inning Stretch.) He was there as a political science major, and didn't enjoy the program at all. Felt it was very weak. The school's gone downhill since then. He transferred here where he created his own co-op at least once, and organized his schedule, when not on co-op, so that he could work an internship at the same time.

Yes, I've met some preppies here, especially in this building of all buildings. But I don't use the term freely, since I remember it being an insult of the highest degree when I was in elementary school. But as a generalization, the idea that all students of this school are rich preppies is too much. Yes, there is rich. Yes, there is preppy. And yes, the two groups often coincide. But not all.

Of course, Boston College is a whole different story...