Last week, a high school student was prevented from walking across the stage at his high school graduation ceremony because he had a beard. Before I got a chance to write about that, I read another story about a local Native American student was was prevented from wearing a beaded cap during graduation. Earlier in the year, a student was suspended for dying her hair a non-natural color.

I have a message for these and all oppressed youths who are being held back by the man and prevented from expressing themselves and doing whatever they want regardless of established rules: get used to it.

Back when I worked for Mazzio’s Pizza, the employee handbook explicitly forbid facial hair. If you showed up to work with a five o’clock shadow, there was a rusty community razor and bar of soap next to the sink that you could use to scrape your face with. If you weren’t willing to do that, you were sent home (without pay of course) and written up. On your third write up — not just for this, but any infraction — you were fired, and nobody wrote a newspaper article about it.

When I worked for Pizza Hut, I served as a shift supervisor on some nights and a delivery driver on others. Shift supervisors had to wear long black pants, while delivery drivers could wear black shorts. One day I showed up to work in shorts (thinking I was going to be delivering pizzas) but instead that night I was scheduled to be the shift supervisor. My manager, who knew I lived fifteen minutes away from the store, sent me home to go change into long pants.

Last month I attended an awards ceremony at Mason’s school, where Mason is one of 550+ eighth graders. For each subject, all the school’s teachers took the stage and handed out certificates to their star students — somewhere between five and ten students per teacher. Each student was called by name to walk up to the stage and accept his or her certificate. There were probably fifty kids on stage by the time all the math teachers had presented their awards. Then they moved on to science, history, English, Spanish, French, the vocal and drama departments, and so on before moving on to things like the Model UN, journalism, the academic bowl, and other school sponsored activities. Even if your kid hadn’t been on stage yet — no child left behind, right? — they still had a shot at the academic awards, in which every kid with a 3.5 average or better (A’s and B’s) received one. Toward the end, they hand out awards for going to school every day. Here’s a picture I took (from the back row, sorry) of some of our special snowflakes on stage:

I’ve told this story before, but one time when Mason was in grade school he come home and told me that it was Field Day. Field Day is an elementary school’s version of the Olympics, where kids compete in events like the high jump and races of varying lengths. For some reason as a kid I was pretty good at the long jump, but that was about it. If I was lucky I’d come home with a ribbon or two (at least one said “Participation” on it) and bide my time until the Spelling Bee rolled around. When I asked Mason if he won any ribbons on his Field Day, he looked at me with that same weird look kids give you when you try to explain to them what payphones were. Of course he got a ribbon, because everybody got a ribbon, because everybody always gets a ribbon. How can you give just one kid a ribbon? That’s favoritism.

That’s also why an 8th grade awards ceremony takes three hours to sit through — because at the end, we’re handing out awards for “coming to school.” The only thing stopping them from handing out certificates for simply being alive is the fact that the mother of some deceased child would probably sue them for discriminating against the dearly departed, and the next year they would have to give out awards to every child that passed away.

Back when I worked at Grandy’s, another cook and I discovered that the outside lighting wasn’t grounded properly, and every time you touched anything metal in the kitchen after dark it would shock the bejesus out of you. Any time you washed dishes, your arms tingled like when you stick your tongue to a nine volt battery. After complaining for weeks to management (who suggested we stand on plastic tubs while doing the dishes) we convinced another employee to call OSHA for us. Our manager told us if he ever found out who called them, he would fire us on the spot.

Look, high school sucks. You have to go, they make the rules, and you have to follow them. It is a card game in which students hold no cards and are forced to sit at the table. If you don’t like the school’s policy against facial hair, the way to fight it is before graduation. Talk to a teacher or an administrator. Go to a board meeting and voice your opinion. Start a newspaper or a petition (or, more likely, a Facebook page — whatever) and rally the troops. Disobeying the man is not the same as fighting him. That’s a hard concept to explain to a generation of kids with more awards than passion.

If nothing else, these kids were lucky to have learned life’s not fair early on. Start ignoring your company’s dress code or grooming policy and see how far that gets you. In the real world, which you are entering the day you graduate high school, you can’t simply break the rules you don’t agree with and not expect consequences. If anyone walks out of high school thinking otherwise, we have truly failed them.