On Injustice

By Ethan Jasny

Loyalty. It’s a simple concept that transcends culture and history. When someone is loyal—when they are vulnerable enough to display their undying devotion—they deserve to be recognized and celebrated. And when we fail to recognize that person, and instead cast them aside, we have perpetrated a great injustice. 

But how can we quantify loyalty? How long must one devote oneself to an institution to become loyal? There are some who would say that fourteen years is the threshold for absolute loyalty. They would be wrong. No, loyalty is a subjective measure, and thus the threshold for loyalty ought to be thirteen years instead. That’s right, people who came to WPGA in kindergarten should be considered lifers.

Let’s lay out the facts. As a WPGA junior kindergarten student, your contribution to school is literally nothing. In fact, I would argue that JK students make the school worse by touching everything with their snotty hands and placing lego blocks under the feet of unsuspecting, shoeless passersby. Moreover, JK students are stupid. Did you know—and this is an empirical fact—that having a class of JK students lowers the average intelligence of the school. Seriously, go up to a JK student and ask them what eight times seven is; you will not be impressed.

And yet, students who have been at the school since junior kindergarten have the audacity to call themselves lifers and claim superiority over those who arrived a mere year later. In reality, because junior kindergarten is an admissions year and kindergarten is not, it is far more impressive to have started school at WPGA in kindergarten. To get into JK, a student just has to show up, but to get into kindergarten, a student has to show exemplary control over colouring book mechanics and have a master’s degree in Magna-Tiles design and construction.

You might say, then why not change the lifer qualification year to grade one or later? To which I’d say: well, the lifer status is really more of a novelty than it is an actual honour, more a funny fact about your tenure at the school than it is a reflection of your loyalty or contributions. Becoming a WPGA student earlier doesn’t actually say anything about a student because it usually isn’t their choice to attend the school anyway, so really you’re just making a big deal out of nothing. Kindergarten it is then. 

Regardless, what is undeniably clear is that a major injustice exists in our community. All of you who stay silent, who fail to speak out against former junior kindergarteners’ monopoly on being lifers are complicit in cementing an arbitrary system of oppression that has held the “almost” lifers back for generations.

Now, can I please have one of those commemorative timepieces?