Growing Up Against All Odds: Enjoying New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast

Michael Phillips’ Growing Up Against All Odds is a deeply honest and powerful portrayal of his experiences of severe bullying not only in Junior High School but also in his own family and in work settings. Such “bullyism” is much the same as the racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, ageism--and even “weightism,” “heightism,” “beautyism,” “queerism” and “intelligencism”--that most of us experience from one day to the next. Robert W. Fuller, former President of Oberlin College, had a word for such hierarchical and abusive behavior: RANKISM, as discussed in his books, Somebodies and Nobodies and All Rise. Rankism permeates every single aspect of present-day societies.

Yet Phillips refuses to fall into the trap of writing a cold, distant and abstract analysis of what happened to him over the years of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. As someone with many journalistic experiences—his first publication, which appeared in a sociology textbook, was written at age 11—he has “fire in the belly.” His passionate portrayals of what he went through impact readers in much the same way that novelists achieve their best results.

In his final paragraph Phillips writes: “I believe that every single one of us has enormous potential for personal development, including intellectual [“head”] and emotional [“heart”] development along with the ability to solve problems” [“hand”]. He uses this extremely broad “head-heart-hand” approach in responding to his rankist experiences. Instead of buckling under the weight of all that abuse, he was able to move on from those negative experiences to find a career direction as well as to explore what this wonderful country has to offer. He writes about his positive experiences in such sections as “Getting to Know Milwaukee: Festivals and Country Fairs,” “Chicago Neighborhoods, Food and Festivals,” “Minor League Baseball and College Football,” “Exploring the Midwest: State Fairs and Festivals,” “Rediscovering New England,” “Enjoying D.C.,” “Southern Food,” “College Football Southern Style” and “Exploring the Southeast.” By so doing he gives the rest of us a direction for moving from meaningless to meaningful experiences [“head”}, from negative to positive emotions [“heart”], and from powerlessness to a powerful ability to make progress on the problem of rankism [“hand”].