Understanding the struggles around us

(Editor's note: Tuckahoe Middle School seventh-grade English students recently wrote editorials designed to persuade Henrico citizens to read, listen to or watch a story or book that reflected their individual cultures, as a way to help others better understand them. This is one of those editorials; click here to read others.)

My name does not matter, but I am a basketball payer of the small forward position, although I might be a power forward now. I am a gamer who is saving up for a computer. I am very politically active and have helped my friend Henry and sister Ruby go to court to give a speech to tear down the monuments (they did . . . kind of). My political beliefs are a very huge part of me and not everyone agrees with me but I stand by it and have tried to surround myself with people like me.

I have many types of cultures, I am white, if that counts as one. I have a specific dark humor that makes me gravitate towards people with it, too. I love my family and animals. I am a humongous Game of Thrones fan. I have gone to dozens of marches in the past two years, including the Women's March (feminism), March for Our Lives (gun violence) and many Black Lives Matter protests including a socially distanced one in D.C. after former President Trump allowed police to tear-gas people to get to a church. My first protest was in D.C. when I lived there. I was 4 months old and the protest was against the Iraq war in 2008. I have many very specific cultures, so I am part of the 0.01% of people in the basketball player-gamer-Asoiaf geek-Democrat-protester culture.

MunMun is a book about a world in which characters have two bank accounts: MunFlow (material cash) and MunScale (their size). The richer a person is, the more money they can put in their MunFlow. And in this world that determines your physical size. The more money, The taller. The less money, the smaller. We follow a first-person narrator called Warner. He and his family have exactly 0 MunMun. They live in a Milk Jug and live naked because there are no clothes made for people that small, if there were they couldn’t afford them. One day a MiddleRich (about $1 million) boy named Jarvis steps on Warner’s dad while running from bullies, killing him. This literally is an exact example of Rich people stepping on the poor to get what they want. In this case what Jarvis wants is an escape (which is truly what everyone wants deep down, an escape). Another amazing part is right at the climax, and I’ll try to tiptoe around spoiling. In this world there is a minimum amount of money a person can have (MinMun). You can raise it if you give money to the state to raise it. A character finally gets what they want, money, their plan is to use all the money to raise MinMun to 10,000 MunMuns per person. They have about 200 Billion MunMun. Unfortunately the system gets to them and they are corrupted by all the power they got from their MunMun.

It is an amazing allegory for class and race differences in the real world. Everybody needs to read this because it is important to know these things. Even if students don’t actively realize the message they will still subconsciously think of the characters when they see the events in the book unfold in real life. It will ingrain them in a culture of people more aware of the differences and struggles of those around them, and that is always needed by everybody.