{"id":162895,"date":"2015-03-19T02:37:49","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T02:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/03\/19\/carriagelamp-dearnonacepeople-so-let-me-get-this\/"},"modified":"2015-03-19T02:37:49","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T02:37:49","slug":"carriagelamp-dearnonacepeople-so-let-me-get-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/03\/19\/carriagelamp-dearnonacepeople-so-let-me-get-this\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

carriagelamp<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

dearnonacepeople<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it\u2019s \u201cunfair\u201d but if you do it in real life it\u2019s \u201ccapitalism\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You know what, I\u2019m going to tell you guys a story.<\/p>\n

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money\u2026<\/p>\n

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.<\/p>\n

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. \u00a0"Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. \u00a0The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“<\/p>\n

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.<\/p>\n

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the \u201cupper class\u201d had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn\u2019t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.<\/p>\n

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn\u2019t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much\u00a0I was in jail all the time because there was no \u201cgame over\u201d<\/i>. \u00a0If I couldn\u2019t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
<\/i><\/p>\n

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn\u2019t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. \u00a0They were\u00a0stressed<\/i>. Because they were always\u00a0that close<\/i> to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.<\/p>\n

(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a \u201csocialist\u201d society instead. I\u2019m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

carriagelamp: dearnonacepeople: So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it\u2019s \u201cunfair\u201d but if you do it in real life it\u2019s \u201ccapitalism\u201d?\u00a0 You know what, I\u2019m going to tell you guys a story. In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3767,5853,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162895"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}