Ladies and Gentlemen: Libby Norris

Once class was over on Thursday, Libby Norris and I sat down and talked. It started off very informal and laid back, which was as sign (no keyword intended) that Libby was going to be very easy to talk to. We began talking about what colleges we were in, what our majors were and what year we were both in school. We realized that we were both freshman and upon hearing this Libby was surprised that I was one; she had though I was older, which I have been getting a lot lately. My birthday was last Tuesday and I was with someone who had the same birthday as me but she was turning 21 and she thought I was older than her. I don’t know, I just find that interesting…

ANYWAYS, Libby is an Architecture major who attended Totino Grace High School, a private school with a total enrollment of 1,000 people. We soon realized we attended two very different high schools where she went to a smaller private school and I attended a behemoth public school with enrollment over 2500 only 10^th through 12^th grade. But that fact didn’t seem to deter us when it came to our feelings on high school because we both had had a great time in high school and had gotten a lot out of our experiences in a place where some people have a lot of issues.

Soon, we started to discuss our parents. Libby’s parents both work for the state of Minnesota in the DNR department. We found a common trait in the point that my mom works for the state as well in the Health and Human resources department. This may be just a coincidence but I see it as valid that her mom and dad and my mom are both liberal leaning in there thinking and they both happen to work for the state. Libby had asked if my mother was in a union, and to be honest I had no idea. Libby said she probably was because both of her parents were in one as well (Libby seemed to know more about it than I did.) Libby also said that her father was more liberal leaning than her mother, but still both are liberal.

After talking about our parents we got into each other’s work histories. Libby has been a nanny for the past five summers 3 or 4 days a week. She really enjoys it because she loves being with the kids and she gets paid “Straight cash homey.” In addition to her nanny job she worked at Dairy Queen this past summer. Libby stated she liked who she had worked with, but when it came to her boss she did not at all. “I could have done a better job than those guys.” Is what she said at one point. Dairy Queen was her first working experience where she had to fill out W-2’s and things of that nature. So to say she hasn’t had much experience with formal work would be true (which is the same with me.) She did not receive many working hours from Dairy Queen so she said when she would get a 90 dollar paycheck she would just use it as spending money, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She held the belief that many people do that when you receive a small allotment of money it is easier to spend it than it is to receive a large amount of money.

We then dove into the PowerPoint where it asked the questions. We started to discuss one of the questions asking whether or not free market was fair to the rest everyone. Here Libby said that she did not think that people are not born equally and that opportunity isn’t distributed that way as well. One thing that stuck out about our discussion about this topic was when she said that a poor black kid from the inner city does not have the same opportunity as a middle-class white kid from suburbia. This I feel like is a driving belief that many people hold when it comes to a free market economy. A person either believes a point like that or doesn’t and there isn’t really a middle ground. For Libby she seemed adamant about this point and seemed to believe in it whole-heartedly. The only experience with Unions that I got out of her was that her cousin has worked at an Arby’s for the past three years and they are currently in a union. She said that the union is beneficial but there are definitely drawbacks like paying “union dues.” She didn’t go into much detail on what these “dues” would be. Frankly I didn’t even think about there being dues with unions.

So after obtaining all this information about Libby in the brief time we discussed I learned a few things about her. I learned that she is definitely liberal leaning which we discussed is largely based off of her parents and just a common trend with people in general. Libby has been working for her entire teenage life (an accomplishment I have not been able to achieve) and has greatly enjoyed her nanny job. Libby also believes that opportunity does not always come equal to everyone and just because everyone gets the same amount of time in the day that that does not mean that life is fair from the beginning. Like me, Libby does not have many experiences with unions with herself but does in the sense that both of her parents are in one. Libby had gotten a 3 on her initial test and when we went over it again we both could not remember all the ones we agreed and disagreed with, which is a point that should not be lost on Libby, not because she has a faint memory but because she thinks about issues when they are presented to her. I am excited to change her mind.