The Republican voters are caucusing in Iowa tonight, starting in a couple of hours and finishing sometimes before midnight. And the expectation is that Donald J. Trump (Is it meaningful at all that it just took me three tries to type his name correctly? Probably only indicative of the fact that I’m pretty tired right now, and I haven’t done a lot of typing in the last few weeks. Or it’s an omen.) will win, thereby “signaling” that he is “most likely” going to be the Republican party’s nominee for President this year.
Seriously, guys? I mean, come on.
So here’s the reality. Trump is definitely going to win the Iowa caucus tonight, despite the absurdly cold weather, despite the hilarious fact that some unknown number of Iowans registered as Republicans specifically so they could vote against Trump in the caucus, and, of course, despite the fact that Trump has been indicted in four different criminal cases, along with currently being in court for two civil cases, and fighting off who knows how many other claims against him personally and against his businesses. He’s going to win the Iowa caucus for the same reason he’s going to win every single Republican primary in every single state: because Republicans love him.
They love him for a variety of reasons. Some think he did a phenomenal job as President. Some think he projects an aura of strength, which they think we need with so many problems going on in the world today. Some think he is just like them, and they want to see him succeed because that implies that they, too will succeed. Some love him because he’s a racist, sexist piece of shit, and so are they, and they think he will help them to achieve the racist and sexist dreams they hold close to their hearts.
(All of these people are wrong, by the way. But they believe they are not. Don’t judge them too harshly: we all believe lies. Many people reading this believe that Barack Obama was a great man and a great president. Many people reading this believe this country is a democracy, and that we are free. Many people reading this believe that things will turn out all right in the end. None of those things are true, either.)
And then there’s the biggest group: the people who will support Donald Trump despite knowing that he’s a racist, sexist, corrupt, narcissistic piece of shit, because they believe he will be better for the country than the Democrats, and specifically Joe Biden.
Those people might be right.
All right, hold on; no, I haven’t lost my mind, and no, I haven’t surrendered to the cynicism that did definitely increase thanks to the pretty awful situation my family has gone through over the last year or so. I am probably trying to be more honest in this post than I frequently am, because normally I shape what I’m saying for my audience, and I am rethinking that. I am also certainly looking to shock some of you with this opening; and now that I have your attention and you are maybe a bit off balance, I will explain further, and see if we can come to a consensus.
Unlike Americans.
See, there has never been a single majority opinion held by Americans. Not by the majority of us. The majority of Americans do not vote, so no election has been decided by the majority; and the majority have not been consulted in every non-democratic decision made in this country, which is the vast majority of them. We don’t all agree, and we never have. What we do is comply, and accept.
We accept that the two-party system is what we are stuck with, and then we comply with that system. We accept that capitalism is the system we are stuck with, and then we comply with that system. We accept that we cannot eliminate racism from the American consciousness, and then — and this is the difficult part, but it is a true thing — we comply with the system of racism that exists in this country. We may not do it, depending on who we are, for racist reasons; I am not a racist, and I hope and trust that most people reading my writing, therefore, are not racists. Though I was brought up within a racist system and a racist culture, so there are definitely racist ideas in my head and racist feelings in my heart, and there always will be, because we do not, ever, escape our childhood and upbringing, a fact that has been brought home to me recently. But I am not a racist because I do not subscribe to those thoughts and feelings when they arise: I question myself constantly when I think about race, and I question whether my instincts are reasonable, or racist; and if they are racist, I try not to listen to them.
But I comply with a racist system. Take, for example, de facto segregation in this country, which is almost universal. I live in a less-desirable area in Tucson, Arizona. I used to live in a much more desirable area, but we rented there, and we own our home here. We own our home here because this is what we could afford: we had an area we wanted to buy in, and an area we were willing to buy in — and then there was the area we could afford to buy in. Which is where we bought.
Now: guess which, of the desirable area and the less-desirable area, is more diverse racially. You already know, don’t you? And because we want to move to the more desirable area, we will be moving out of the racially diverse area and into the racially homogenous area as soon as we can afford to. And there are plenty of good reasons for us to move — one of which is, honestly, entirely unrelated to race, and it might even be the best reason to move: our commute is too bloody long, and we’d really really like to live closer to school — but all of them, all of them, comply with and therefore encourage and maintain the racist system that is the status quo in this country. There is more crime where we are now, and less in the desirable area. The property values are better in the desirable area. There are fewer homeless people, and less trash on the street, in the desirable area. There is more open space and more green space in the desirable area to walk our dogs. Those are all good reasons for us to move, and they are why we will move. But when we do that, we will be moving our white selves into the white area, and out of the more racially diverse area. We will be maintaining the segregated status quo in Tucson.
Why? Because we can’t change it. And because we have enough other shit to deal with in our lives without spending what energy and passion we have in a futile effort to change Tucson’s, or Arizona’s, or America’s, or the whole world’s racist systems.
But, see, that’s where we’re wrong. We do impossible things by doing them. Not by recognizing that they are impossible, and then walking away without fighting. We decide to try, even though we know it is impossible, and we try, and we fight — and that’s how we win. That’s how things change.
Does it always happen that way? Of course not: impossible things are impossible for a reason, and that reason is usually enough to overcome efforts to change things that cannot be changed.
But sometimes? Sometimes things change.
And on this day, named in celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I think it is only appropriate to recognize that sometimes, it is worth fighting the impossible fight, because sometimes, you win.
Even if you then get assassinated and much of the country goes right back to the same racist status quo.
It’s worth fighting for change because even though that happened to Dr. King, he still made things different. He moved the needle. Trump is no worse a racist piece of shit than half of the past presidents of this country, but the main difference now is that we recognize that he is a racist piece of shit. And that is a problem for him. He needs to fight that perception, he needs to talk in dog whistles. Not always, because there are plenty of racist pieces of shit who support him, and they like when he says shit directly like “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country.” (And then defends it by saying he didn’t know that was a racist piece of shit thing to say.) A century ago, he wouldn’t have had to defend that, he would have repeated it and made it part of his stump speech. So: progress. Change.
Why hasn’t the change been larger? Simple: because not enough of us fight. That’s why it hasn’t lasted longer, and why it hasn’t spread farther, and why so many of us don’t see positive results. Not enough of us fight that fight.
I want to fight. I intend to fight. Probably for more than one thing, more than one cause, more than one change. I do want to fight systemic racism: but not only that. But I want to do it right. I want to do it strategically, and intentionally, and thoughtfully — which has never been how I’ve written, or how I’ve done anything. I vastly prefer flying by the seat of my pants.
But I just spent the last eleven years writing a single story, The Adventures of Damnation Kane. And while I think I’ve written some excellent pieces on this blog, and I’m proud of everything I’ve written on this blog, that story — those books — are better. Because I spent even more time thinking about them than I did writing them.
So I need to think more about this, and I need to strategize and I need to plan. Then I need to get to work.
This post is intended to make that public, in order to give me more motivation to do this thing the way I need to do it. It’s sad that I need an additional push, but that’s the truth: I do. Otherwise I’m just going to fly by the seat of my pants. (By the way, I’m also still going to write about teaching and school, and to review books and all of that. But there will definitely be more political speech in this, and more attempts to drive and enact social change. That’s the fight. And I’m going to get into it.) And I suspect that I will continue to fly by the seat of my pants, and to write extemporaneously, while I work on my strategy and my plan; because writing is how I form and crystallize my thoughts, and this is a good way to do that; and because I am loath to try to conceal my plans. I think it will be more convincing if I can be open about what I am doing and why, all the way. Here’s hoping I’m right.
So let me bring this back to where I started: now that it is nearly 4pm MST, and that means the Iowa Caucuses are probably starting to cast their votes for Donald Trump.
I, like everyone else who opposes Donald Trump becoming President again, wish that he would just go away. I wish that he would die (and I won’t apologize for wishing that, not when he talks openly about killing people as a joke), or I wish that he would be convicted and go to jail.
But I realized something in the last week. That’s wrong.
Trump should run in the Presidential election. He should run: and we should fight him.
And we should win.
We need to have that fight, in this country, and we need to shoulder our part of that fight, and do what needs to be done. That’s what will make the greatest change.
So: I want Trump to win the caucuses tonight. I want him to succeed in putting off all of his trials until after the election. I want him to hold rallies, and say every shitty thing that comes into his little hairball of a brain, and I want millions of Americans to laugh and cheer and agree with him. I want him to win the GOP nomination and have every Republican line up behind him, and I want him to run in November.
And then I want for all of us to fucking destroy him at the polls.
Then I want him to go to jail for the rest of his miserable traitorous life. I want him to die in prison. And I want the history books to describe his legacy in actual, factual terms: I want historians in the next fifty years to write about how lucky we all were that Trump never got a second term, because of the existential danger he posed to democracy and to the rule of law and to America as a nation and as a people.
I do not want people to turn him into a martyr and pine about what could have happened if the Democrats hadn’t put him in prison (or killed him with COVID vaccines, which is, I don’t doubt, what millions of dipshit Americans will believe whenever Trump dies, however he dies) and he had been allowed to run, and they had been allowed to cast their votes the way they wanted to. I want them to vote for Trump.
And I want them to lose.
I want to fight.
I hope to convince you all to join me in that fight.
Some of you were probably wondering why I vanished.
Two months and a day since my last post. Nothing on here since October 3rd, when before that I was posting every single week, pretty consistently — I lost it in May and June, sure, but that’s the end of the school year; there’s no particular reason why October and November would see me go dark and silent. I mean, sure, October is the month of darkness, and — can I make any connection between Thanksgiving and silence? Or no, how about Veterans’ Day? Or Indigenous People’s Day, maybe?
Never mind. I don’t have it in me to joke or to bullshit much.
I do apologize for my absence; I really did intend to stay consistent for as long as I could, and I still want to write. But both things became impossible about ten days after my last post. In the time intervening, I have learned some more about what I’m capable of, and what I’m not, and more about what matters and what doesn’t.
What matters is the truth. What doesn’t matter is polite fictions.
So the truth is, my father-in-law — step-father-in-law, really — killed himself. He used a gun. He was 87, and a drug addict, among other things. He was also a veteran, a former US Marine, and so for the sake of Veterans’ Day and all, I don’t want to get into too much detail about him or the circumstances or the reasons for his death. But he did it at his home in Kingman, on the other end of Arizona from where my wife and I live in Tucson, about ten days after my last post — somewhere around the 13th of October. And that’s why I haven’t posted, or written, since that last post two months ago: because my wife and I have been dealing with the consequences of his death.
You see, one other thing my stepfather-in-law — his name was Wes, which is much shorter than his title, so I’m going to use that — one other thing Wes was, was his wife’s caretaker. My mother-in-law, Jo. Jo has advanced dementia. She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, she suffered a pair of traumatic brain injuries stemming from two falls she took, both of which resulted in a concussion, in the last few years. She has also gone through some unknown number of mini-strokes. She had been living at home with Wes, who was physically disabled but mentally capable — up until he killed himself.
I got a phone call on the morning of Sunday the 15th of October. I was outside working on my driveway — I’m expanding it because we got a second car, a sweet bright orange 1973 VW Bug — and I wasn’t expecting a call. I normally wouldn’t have answered it: I don’t like phone calls, and I don’t like getting them on the last day of my week-long fall break, which that Sunday was. But I looked at the phone, because I had called Wes the day before and left a message; he had fallen and hurt his knee — he has bad knees (Sorry: he had bad knees) — and had told me he was in a lot of pain, when I talked to him somewhere around the 9th or 10th of October, I don’t remember when. I wanted to tell him then that my wife and I would do anything we could to help. I didn’t say it, though. It wouldn’t have mattered. But I called him on Saturday the 14th, and left him a message saying I was checking in to see how he was doing.
Turns out he was dead. And Jo was at that point in the hospital, though I didn’t know it when I called.
I found that out when I answered the phone Sunday morning: because I looked at my phone, and it was Wes’s daughter, my wife’s stepsister, Dana. I’d never spoken to Dana before: she and Wes hadn’t been that close, and she never got along with Jo, or Toni, my wife. So if she was calling me, I knew it was serious, and it was probably bad. So I answered.
And she told me, tearfully, that her dad was dead, and that Jo was in the hospital. She didn’t know many details, other than the fact that Toni is the executor of both of their wills, as well as the possessor of a durable power of attorney and the responsible party for their medical decisions if they were incapable of making them themselves, for both Wes and Jo. Dana wanted to make sure that Toni would let her take some personal items to remember her father by. I told her that would be completely fine, of course, that I’d talk to Toni and we’d be in touch.
I hung up. I cussed a lot. I felt the beginnings of sadness — but more dread. We had seen some kind of crisis coming for a long time, and here it was.
Then I went inside and told Toni.
So in the last two months — not quite two months, I guess, though it sure feels like three or four years — Toni and I have made two trips to Kingman, a six-hour drive; we have brought Jo down to Tucson and found her a place in a memory care unit in a local assisted living facility. We were able to pay for it because my family has loaned us money, which we expect to pay back when we sell their house — which, the fates and gods willing, should happen very very soon. The second trip was all for dealing with their house. My brother, who had just left his job as a software engineer in order to pursue his personal projects, gave up his time and energy to help us, and drove to Kingman from Mason County, Washington, to help with the house. Together the three of us emptied a three-bedroom house of a couple’s accumulated possessions; we kept everything we thought Jo could use in her new living situation, and donated everything we thought was donatable. The rest went to the landfill. Then my brother, who stayed at the house for an extra week after Toni and I came back to Tucson to go back to teaching, cleaned up and repaired everything that could be done in the house, making it ready to go on the market, which it did, right after Thanksgiving.
We also made sure that Wes got cremated and his daughter took his remains. She also got to take whatever she wanted of his, as did his nephew, who also came to help that first weekend.
We also took care of their two pet dogs. Which I am not going to talk about.
We are still trying to finish arranging things for Jo: the assisted living is, as you may know, ridiculously expensive — over $5,000 a month, all included. It’s a good place: and also one of the cheaper ones in Tucson. But obviously we can’t afford to pay for it. It is not clear how long Jo will live, but it doesn’t matter because we couldn’t pay for one month on our own. And when we first brought her home from the hospital in Kingman, we took care of her for four days: and after that, there was no question that we can not take care of her ourselves. She needs constant care, at a professional level, and we just can’t do that. She will get social security, and since Wes was a veteran, she gets survivor’s benefits; we’re hoping for somewhere in the range of $3000-4000 a month out of those two along with a small pension Wes had which will transfer to Jo. The rest of her monthly costs will come out of the proceeds from selling their house, which fortunately they owned outright — though they did have a reverse mortgage which we will have to pay off out of the proceeds, first. When that money runs out, if Jo lives that long, there is a program called the Arizona Long Term Care System, which should cover the rest of the monthly expense of her care. We may need to find her a cheaper place to live in order to qualify for that program, I don’t know yet — we can’t apply for it until she has less than $2000 in assets.
The point is that we are two months into this, and $15,000 deep, at least. We are still waiting to find out how much money Jo will get from the government.
My wife hasn’t slept well in two months. She has nightmares. I am sleeping better than she is, but I have struggled trying to keep my calm with my students. I snapped on them, the day before we drove up to Kingman for the first time. Snapped harder than I have in two years, and it wasn’t justified. I don’t feel bad, it’s just where I was at the time.
Here’s what I’ve learned from this.
Suicide is an act of violence which harms all of those around the victim. It does not spare anyone from anything: it makes things worse. I guess it spares the dead person. It certainly seems to have been Wes’s escape. I loved the guy, but if it sounds like I’m mad at him and I blame him for what he did, I fucking am, and I fucking do.
Dementia is a terrible condition. Trauma is worse.
There’s not much sadder than the place where someone used to live, and the things they used to own.
The government is slow, but they do good things. Banks and hospitals are fast, and expensive, and they are ABSOLUTELY FUCKING TERRIBLE. (That is not universal. Some wonderful people work in hospitals, along with some bags of crap. Banks seem to be all bad, but my wife and my mother-in-law both worked for banks, so they’re not all bad people. Foothills Bank, a subsidiary of Glacier Bank, though? Absolute garbage.) The real estate industry is both fast and good — but not cheap. It’s okay, they’re worth it.
Insurance is a good thing. You should get some, and then you should keep it. As much as you can. If you are aging, and in ill health with physical disabilities, and you have home health care insurance, FUCKING KEEP THE GODDAMN INSURANCE. Please. I beg you. This shit is too expensive for anyone to just pay for. I know that insurance premiums are costly, too, but this is so much worse: so much more expensive, and so much harder to deal with when you have to deal with the problems of getting sick people what they need, right now, and hope you can find a way to pay for it, too. Get the insurance. Pay for it.
When someone asks how you are, tell the truth. I have spent my life lying and saying I am fine when I’m not. That’s not to say I’ve never been fine; I have lived a good life so far, and I have mostly been fine; but when I’m not, I have always lied. It felt rude to bring people down just because I felt bad and they asked how I was. But I stopped doing that this last two months, and — it’s better. I don’t go into detail — this post is more than I’ve said to any but a handful of people — but when people ask how I am, I make a face, sort of a grimace, and I say, “Not good.” If they want to know and have a right, I tell them something like “There was a death in the family and we’re dealing with the estate;” if they don’t ask or have a right to know, I leave it at Not good. They say they’re sorry I’m going through shit, sometimes they offer to help. I thank them.
It is better than politeness.
The hardest thing has been that we did not know what Wes and Jo were going through. They needed help: and we didn’t know it, because they never said. Wes complained, constantly; but he never asked for help. We tried to get them to move closer to us so we could help; this past summer they agreed — but then Wes changed his mind. He said it would be too hard for Jo to make the transition. He might have been right. But it’s now entirely fucking clear that staying where they were could not work.
So the most important thing I have learned is this: when you need help, ask for help. Don’t be ashamed of need. Don’t back away from help because you don’t know what other people can do for you, or how it will work or what the costs and consequences will be: ask for help from someone you trust, and figure it out with them. I have gotten help from my family, from my friends, from my employer. I have given help, as well; I have been able to do so because I got the help I needed.
If Wes had asked for help, then we could have helped him get the help he needed to take care of Jo, and this horror might not have happened. Instead he hurt all of us, by killing himself. He would have done that anyway: it was not because he was abandoned and alone, he was surrounded by people who loved him, who were willing to help him; he was suicidal for many reasons that had nothing to do with help. But this situation wouldn’t have been as bad, particularly for Jo, if people had been able to help. We would at least have known what was happening, even if we couldn’t have done anything to make it better. The unfortunate truth might have made everyone unhappy: but it would have been better than not knowing.
Please ask for help.
Forgive me for not writing more often; I am also (Though this is not the most important thing) trying to finish my book, and my scant writing time and energy goes to that more than this blog. But I’ve been trying to write this post for two months, and failing; I needed to do this. I apologize, as well, if this has been hard to read, but I won’t lie about how I am. I am not well. I’m better than I was a month or so ago; that first week was by far the worst. I might need to write about all of this more; I will, when I can. I’ll write about other things, too — I have a couple of humdingers in me about school from the last two months.
Please go tell the people you love that you love them. And if you need help — ask for it. Don’t lie about how you are. The truth is better.
*Two of my classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and this week we read one of my favorite sections, the two chapters when Scout goes to first grade for the very first time, and meets her new teacher, Miss Caroline. These chapters are the first which show the novel’s dominant theme, the idea of empathy, that you don’t understand someone until you see events from their perspective; Miss Caroline, seen from Scout’s perspective, is a terrible person who treats Scout badly, shames a poor farm boy named Walter Cunningham, and has no idea how to teach or manage a class. But when you see these chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view — she is a 21-year-old woman, this is her very first day teaching, and in addition to several other problems, one of her sweet lil angels calls her a snot-nosed slut. First graders, man. Freaking savages. — you recognize that this teacher has had the very worst day ever. I explain the chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view, which I understand as a teacher, and I show students how she is not bad, she’s just having a bad day. A lot of times in the past, when I’ve taught this, they get it; my students understand how frustrating and soul-searing Miss Caroline’s day is, and they realize she shouldn’t be blamed or hated for her choices, even when she screws up, as she does a few times.
Part of Miss Caroline’s bad day is that she reads her favorite children’s story to the class — and they don’t react at all, because they are, as Scout puts it, “immune to imaginative literature.” And I look out at my class, half of whom are looking at phones or computers, another third of whom are chatting or spacing out while I talk about this novel, which I have told them is one of my very favorite works of literature, and I say, “Can you imagine what that’s like, to share one of your favorite stories with a class full of students who just don’t care? Who aren’t paying attention? To whom the story makes no difference at all? Can you imagine what that would feel like?”
They couldn’t.
*Yesterday a student climbed up onto a metal stool in my room in order to unplug another student’s Chromebook, which was plugged into an outlet that for no good reason is about seven feet off the floor, near my whiteboard. The student then called out “CANNONBALL!”, jumped off the stool, kicking it out sideways, landing awkwardly as the stool shot out and crashed into a bookcase.
*One of my other classes, in reading through a passage from the novel Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, commented “I didn’t think these characters were African-American. They don’t have African-American names.” The names in question were Maud Martha, and Helen. One student pointed out that Helen is a Greek name, as a way of proving to me that these were clearly not African-American names. (I refrained from pointing out that the student’s name is Roman in origin, though the student in question is Southeast Asian.) Another student told me that the activities the family pursue in the passage are rural, country kinds of activities — specifically gathering wood for a fire — and that made them think the characters were White. To which I responded “Because rural areas are only White? And African-Americans don’t gather firewood?”
Did I mention that my principal was observing me that class? He was. His comment later was that I had had “several teachable moments” in the period. (He also said I handled it well, so that was okay.)
*Today one of my students came back from the restroom, started talking to the other students about something (This was, by the way, while I was talking about Miss Caroline and how it feels when students don’t listen to your favorite story), and at some point I realized that what they were saying was that this student, on the way across the hall to the restroom, had seen someone they didn’t recognize outside the school door (Which is mostly glass and is at the end of the hall near my classroom — who needs that “security” stuff?), that my student had let them in, and that the person in question, referred to both as “kid” and “guy,” was wearing a mask, carrying a backpack, and was currently in the bathroom. Refraining from asking the student why IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY they had let some literal masked stranger into the school, I went to the bathroom to see who was in there. There was someone in the stall, but I could only see shoes. So I quickly went to get an administrator to check on the bathroom, and then I went back to my class — where I received the clarification that the student had not let the person in, a teacher had, which almost certainly moved this from “Possible crisis precipitated by a student who lacks critical thinking skills” to “A student went out to a car, with permission from a teacher, came back in, and my student didn’t recognize them.” And the second option is what it was, and a few seconds later the administrator gave me a thumb’s-up on the way back from identifying the person in the restroom as one of our students.
But it was a fun five minutes.
None of this is what I wanted to write about tonight, however. (Actually I wanted to write about it last night, but another thing that happened this week is my phone stopped working, so I spent last night ordering a new phone.) What I wanted to write about tonight was the worst thing I’ve dealt with in the last week. One of the worst things I’ve had to deal with all year.
Data Day.
Last Friday was our first Data Day. And the big problem with this particular occasion was that it was our very first Data Day at this school. At least the first one involving my department. To be sure, we have looked at data before: data is inescapable in public schools today. We start every school year with a brief overview of the school’s test data from the year before. Which is all about students who have already left the classes in which the data was collected, which might seem to some people as though it reduces the value of the data.
Some people.
Anyway, we look at data all the time. But I work for a small charter school, which has a hell of a lot of turnover in the staff and the administration, and every year things get a bit discombobulated and confusticated and lost in the shuffle; and so we have never done a Data Day like this Data Day. Unfortunately, those in charge of Data Day thought we had all surely done Data Days before, and so didn’t think we would need specific instructions about how one carries out a Data Day. But since we have never had a Data Day before, we did need those instructions, and we didn’t get them, and so the day was — awkward.
But hold on. Before we even get to the awkwardness of the actual day, I can hear you asking “Wait — what even is a Data Day?”
A Data Day is when teachers get together in groups and look at the data for our students — in other words, their test scores. This Data Day was scheduled after we gave our first major standardized test this year, a practice ACT. The ACT, a sort of West-Coast cousin of the SAT, has four parts: Reading, English (grammar, that is), Math, and Science. Now, as I assume that all my readers are among the most astute people in the population, so I assume you have noticed that this selection of tests leaves out a few of the usual departments in a high school: Art, PE, foreign language, computer science, ESS (or SPED) — and, of course, history and social studies.
But that’s fine! Even if not all teachers have data and so can participate in Data Day, the thing to focus on is the subjects which do have data. And lucky for me, English has double the data! And EXTRA lucky for me, this is my first year as head of the English department. So not only do I have double the data — but I get to run the meeting!
Did I mention that my principal was observing my meeting? He was. He did not tell me that I handled this one well. I think I did okay. We had several teachable moments.
But we didn’t have everything. We should have had our individual class data, from the shorter single-subject quizzes we’ve been giving over the course of the semester; we should have all been looking at our individual laptops and comparing our individual data to the school wide data, so we could find where our specific classes were different from the school population as a whole — that is, what are my 10th grade students failing to learn in my class, which the school as a whole is mastering? Those are the areas where I can make changes in my class in order to improve the instruction and the learning in specific skills and knowledges, to help my students catch up. And that was where we were supposed to develop our Action Plan, building SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) so that, when we have our next round of ACT practice tests in December, we can move straight into our second Data Day, and we can see what areas have improved and where we need to keep working, maybe finding new strategies that can make a difference in the scores. That is the goal of a Data Day.
I ran the meeting. Completely making it up as I went along, because I have never done a full Data Day. I didn’t tell everyone they needed to bring their laptops and individual classroom data. I didn’t have my individual classroom data. I had not examined the school wide data previously, and so while I pointed out a couple of obvious things — our students did better on reading and English than they did on math and science (I work at a STEM school, if you didn’t know.), better on English than on reading (which mystified me because they mostly can’t answer a single grammar question correctly — but I guess they can correct grammar on a multiple choice test?), and in some cases better, in others worse, when compared grade to grade. But everything I said was obvious. I didn’t know that we were supposed to create a SMART goal, or how to do that, and I didn’t take notes or guide the discussion or watch the time — or delegate any of those tasks. I did a bad job with the meeting. It was uncomfortable. That was my first Data Day.
So.
You all know that whole thing is a pile of horsepucky, right?
I knew you were all astute.
Okay, let me be clear: the basic idea of examining what my students know and what they don’t know, identifying areas where they have mastered the class content and where they still need work, and then strategizing methods to improve their learning? All of that is fine. None of that is horsepucky. We can get general ideas about how things are going, and we can find some ways to maybe make them better; that’s fine. It is a lot of work, for a questionable reward, and since I am already obscenely overworked, and still behind where I should be, I question whether or not this is the best way for me to spend my time; since I have 300 ungraded assignments turned in on my online education platform, I have a better idea of how I could spend a good couple of hours on a Friday afternoon.
Yup. Drinking.
I grade on Sundays. I shouldn’t. But I don’t have any other option. I’m not kidding about the 300 ungraded assignments, and that’s after I spend at least a few hours working every Sunday, and have done since the school year started August 1. A couple of hours on Friday afternoon, even if I hadn’t used that time as I deserve and gone drinking, would have helped make a dent in that pile — though of course it wouldn’t have eliminated the pile. But Data Day didn’t help at all. In fact it stressed me out so much that I didn’t even get my other tasks finished on Friday: I went home and collapsed uselessly on my couch. I did play some Minecraft, so that’s a win, I guess.
But let’s imagine that I did have some extra time, a couple of spare hours that I didn’t have to spend teaching class or working with students or grading essays. I could have done Data Day. I could have compared the results of a test which the students didn’t care about and didn’t try their hardest on, because they knew perfectly well they weren’t going to get graded on it, and that it wasn’t the official ACT, and therefore this test didn’t give them a chance to get a high score they could use to get into college or win scholarships; to the results of a series of short, five-question multiple choice assessments I give in my class, one for each standard they are supposed to master this school year. Those, also, the students didn’t care about and so didn’t try on. But hey, that makes the comparison more valid, right? The students taking it didn’t care, in both cases! Matching apathy! Also, neither set of tests was designed by me, or related directly to the content I used to teach the standards — none of them are on To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance. Oh, and also, the ACT is not broken down by standard, so I’m comparing a five-question multiple choice quiz on a single standard to a 40-question reading test and a 75-question English language test, on all of the standards taught in all four years of high school, and also quite a few that come up in middle school and a couple that are only used in college or adult life. Because one aspect of the ACT is that it is designed to be too hard, in parts, for any student to get a 100% on. Because the goal is to find the extent of a student’s knowledge and ability, right? If I give you a quiz on what you know, and you get 100%, I have not found the extent of your knowledge: those questions might cover every single thing you know on the subject — or they might only scratch the surface of your galactic levels of knowledge. To find out for sure, I have to make the questions get progressively harder until you cannot answer them correctly. That’s where I can assume your knowledge ends, when you can’t answer the questions any more. Which means the ACT tests, like all similar tests, is intended to get progressively harder until it becomes impossible for any high school student to answer the questions.
Which means, of course, that there will always be gaps and areas for improvement, no matter how spectacularly I teach and the students learn, because of the way the test is designed. So if I take this concept seriously, that I need to teach my students enough for them to be able to score 100% on the test, I can never be complacent. Ever. I will always have more to teach. But of course, my students will move on out of my class before I finish teaching them; but that’s fine, they can learn the rest of everything in their next class.Right?
Sure.
More to the point, did you catch where I described how different the two tests are? Five questions on a single standard, compared to 115 on the general areas of reading and writing. Also, the standardized tests are given in very short timeframes, because the ACT’s base assumption is that the more you know about a subject, the faster you can answer the questions. An assumption that is so deeply flawed that it casts doubt on all of the ACT results — because of course speed has little if anything to do with knowledge or skill. A genius with bad eyesight or dyslexia or a headache the day of the test will not be able to answer all the questions within the time limit, which is 35 minutes for the 40 reading questions (which are about four different reading passages, with 10 questions each), and 45 minutes for the 75 grammar questions, which is just cruel. Oh wait, sorry: that’s only for the 11th graders. The 10th graders took shorter tests in shorter time limits — 24 reading questions in 30 minutes, and so on. But that’s fine, I’m sure we can compare the two classes and get some kind of useful idea of how much students know. Right?
Right?
Sure.
Here’s the part that killed me. Right at the start, when I’m trying to fumble my way through the schoolwide data we have about the ACT and Pre-ACT tests, and the middle school results from an entirely different assessment which the 6th-8th graders took, we were told to ignore the gaps in the test results that were caused by students who were having a bad day, or who had a headache the day of the test, or who didn’t care and so didn’t try. Because we can’t control those things. We need to focus on the places where we can have an impact, where we can raise those scores.
Uhh — excuse me? How can we know which areas are lacking because of a flaw in the program, and which are lacking because students didn’t feel like trying their hardest? That’s right: we can’t. Just like we can’t see the specific standards for the questions on the ACT (I don’t think; there might be a way to break it down like that, but I didn’t know it, so.), and we can’t know if the five-question multiple choice quizzes give us good information, either, because in addition to being skewed by student apathy and also student humanity, five questions won’t do a good job of determining what the student knows and what they don’t. You can randomly guess on five multiple choice questions and have a not-insignificant chance of getting them all correct even if you couldn’t read at all. And also, let’s not forget that if a student learns all the material, but then fails the assessment because of a non-academic reason like a disability or an illness or a lack of motivation or a grudge against the school or the teacher or a bad testing environment or a bad breakup or a bad bit of potato they ate the night before which gave them vivid dreams in which they were visited by three different spirits of Christmas — that student did not succeed. They do not pass Go, they do not collect $200, because our system is based largely on high-stakes tests and the ability to pass them. And it doesn’t matter what I teach or how well I teach if a student who fails the assessment, despite knowing everything about my subject, is considered a failure. All of the things that I was told to ignore, because they are out of my control, are the entire reason why that hypothetical student could fail my class.
But guess who would still get at least some of the blame for that student’s failure. And who would have to make SMART goals to try to improve that student’s test results. And who would have to examine that student’s data, again and again, to find the reason why the student was unsuccessful. But please, keep ignoring the aspects we can’t control, like a lack of motivation.
Right.
Sure.
And while we’re at it: who the hell told educators that we could control anything? Listen, you don’t know how hard I tried today, to make my students learn the lesson of Miss Caroline. And instead they were distracted by the possibility that someone had let in a school shooter — which was exactly where all their thoughts went when they heard that there was a possible stranger in the school, in a mask and carrying a backpack. Because of course that’s what they thought. And I’m supposed to teach those kids? To control their learning? To specifically assess the lessons that worked and the ones that didn’t, and to make adjustments which will ensure all the learning happens exactly as we want it to, which will then be shown clearly on the test?
Let me also say: if I go back tomorrow and try again to teach the same lesson, my students will say “We already went over this yesterday.” And if I say “Right, but you didn’t learn it as well as you should have, because you were distracted,” they will then reply, “That’s okay, we learned enough. We should move on.” And it wont matter how much I try to teach the lesson, how hard I want to reteach it, or whether I know exactly how to make that lesson more effective: it was ineffective because of events outside of my control. The opportunity was lost. We did not have a teachable moment today.
Here’s the truth. That neat, data-driven ideal, where teachers do the math and find the perfect way to help students reach mastery? School doesn’t work that way. Students don’t work that way, learning doesn’t work that way, even tests don’t work that way. None of it is scientific. None of it is precise. There are real benefits to teachers getting together and talking about what works and what doesn’t, and trading ideas and strategies; to that extent, Data Day was a real success. But otherwise? There is no data. Not anything real, not anything reliable. It’s all guesstimates, all gray area. Teachers do things that seem like they work, that seemed like they’ve worked in the past; students seem to learn things, and seem to get grades that reflect their learning. Somewhere in there, real learning happens, and part of it is probably because of what teachers do. But not all of it. And none of it for certain. Data Day is an attempt to pretend otherwise, to pretend that we can capture a mathematic truth about human beings, who are not by our nature quantifiable. And it just doesn’t work.
But hey, maybe that was just this time. All those things about human nature and whatnot? All out of our control. Let’s try to focus on what we can control, and we’ll circle back around in a few months and see what the data tells us.
That’s not entirely true. I have had a metric fuck-ton of arguments in my life. It’s been a whole thing for me: it is a strong aspect of my teaching, mainly because it is a required essay format that all students have to learn, and so I always teach; it is largely what brought me online in a meaningful way, along with books, because my first two serious website interactions were with a book club and an argument site; it has taken up probably the majority of my online time (Though I don’t know how to measure that, really, so “majority” may be an exaggeration. But a lot of the time I have spent online, I have spent arguing.). I also argue with my students, but since they suck at arguing, that is closer to modeling good language use than it is an attempt to convince anyone of the truth. The online arguing is the larger issue. It has become a way I define myself, a point of pride; I tell my students, when I first introduce myself to them, that I am a pacifist — but I argue online all the time.
I mean that to be ironic. Why would someone who believes in peace and nonviolence and being nonconfrontational also go after people online?
And now I am thinking: maybe I should stop being ironic. Maybe I should just be who I think I should be, who I want to be. Someone who believes in peace, and nonviolence, and being nonconfrontational. It’s not that simple, of course. Because one of the paradoxes of being a pacifist is that I have to live in a world in which people are violent and confrontational, and love fighting; so if I maintain my belief in being nonconfrontational and noncombative, all that happens is I get railroaded, and squashed flat, and violent people take advantage of me. The only way I can be a pacifist is, sometimes, to fight back against those who would create conflict, in order to maintain a larger peace. I believe that; I have accepted it. So I fight: I try to fight against those whose opinions would promote conflict and violence and abuse, both those who are bullies and those who work, intentionally or not, on creating a world where it is easier to bully.
So for the last few years, that has been my intent. I have fought against those whose political stance promotes the supremacist and fascist stances of the Republican party, particularly those who promote Trump and claim to oppose Covid-19 vaccines and climate change policies, because those three things — the devastation of the global climate, the suppression of medicine which prevents the spread of a deadly pandemic, and one orange-skinned motherfucker who wants to take over the world and make it dance for him and him alone — are the greatest threats we face, in my opinion. Trump is largely symptomatic, not causative, but the movement he represents is unquestionably an existential threat, particularly for marginalized and endangered communities. I do also argue against censorship, particularly in schools, and against the attempt to destroy public schools (both largely promoted by that same Trumpian movement), and I try to argue whenever I can for trans rights because I see trans people as the population currently suffering the most virulent and vituperative attacks, at least in my proximity. I think it is a good thing that I have stood up for those causes, for those groups and those people, and against those groups and those people who would attack and do harm. It has not been good for me: that’s for damn sure. I get mad almost every time I get into an argument, and that is not healthy, neither mentally and emotionally, nor physically; it disrupts my sleep, spikes my blood pressure, distracts me from other things I want to do so that I am more often frustrated and unproductive, and therefore I take away from other things — like sleep, or relaxing downtime — so that I can accomplish my productive tasks. Because I already burned up my productive time arguing with some choad about how women’s sports do not need to be protected from trans women because trans women are women, goddammit.
But how much good have I actually done in all those years and years of arguments?
Probably none.
I hate that. But it is probably the truth.
I said last week that I have been persuaded, that I have read an essay by A.R. Moxon which showed me that my habit of fighting online is not only unproductive, but even damaging to the causes I believe in. Moxon pointed out that when someone — like me — says the same points that conservatives and fascists and transphobes and whoever have already heard before, it only shows those people that liberals and progressives have nothing new to say, all think the same things, only echo what we have been taught by our progressive liberal media sources.
The same things I believe about conservatives.
The more I argue, the harder this conviction sets in for my opponents. The more they believe that people on my side are fools, or liars, or mere puppets. I’ve seen this: I’ve seen people take my arguments as signs that I don’t understand the truth, or that I believe lies, or that I don’t care about truth because I have a political agenda; and even as I steadily disprove their points and prove mine, they simply become more strident in hollering that I am a liar and a fool and a sucker. Sometimes they do this while proving some of their points and disproving some of mine (Because while my stances are always right, my arguments are not always perfect, and sometimes I am mistaken), but whether they are right or wrong about their arguments, the point is that they become more adamant about never accepting my arguments, the more I argue with them.
My arguments, in other words, make people less persuadable.
This means that my arguing is bad for everyone. That cut out the last string that was holding up my need to argue. I already knew it was bad for me. I already knew I didn’t like it any more. I already knew I’m not actually as good at it as I thought I was, or told myself I was, in the past. But I still thought it was the right thing to do because I had to stand up for my causes: but not if I’m harming the cause by agitating the opposition, by making them harder to convince, not least because I almost always get mad and take that out by insulting my opponents, even though I know, and have taught my students for years, that insults lost arguments, that the second I mock my opponent, they stop listening to anything I have to say, even if everything else I say is deeply persuasive. All they focus on is the insult.
And rightfully so: because when my opponent insults me, I get so pissed off at that audacity that I no longer care about the argument: I care about showing that sonuvabitch that he’s not only wrong, he’s an idiot. I frequently prove that when I set out to do it – but it never helps. Of course. It just makes them madder and more smug, even while I keep getting madder and more smug. And of course, that leads to my worst habit: I am terrible about needing to get the last word. Even if it keeps me going back to a terrible argument, I keep doing it as long as the other person keeps replying to me. Even though I mock people for arguing simply to satisfy their need to win points and one-up people they disagree with.
Like I said. I need to stop being ironic.
It wasn’t just this essay that convinced me I need to stop. For one thing, I have walked away from arguing in the past – first when I finally escaped from the debate websites I started on, where I did the most harm to myself, wasting the most time, destroying the most sleep, wrecking my own mental health just because some asshat said something shitty about gay people or about public education in this country – or, God forbid, about gun control.
This was me. Of course.
Also this. My wife, who has been trying to gently persuade me to stop hurting myself with this stupidity for just about fifteen years, has always been able to tell when I am arguing because I type harder and faster and with an angrier expression on my face.
Though I’ve never actually shed blood on the keyboard.
So I’ve known for years that I should stop. I’ve had my wife telling me so, and she’s always right. (I never argue with her, by the way. I know my limits. Sort of.) I have also, in the last few years, recognized that my teaching of argument has not actually helped my students learn how to write better arguments: they write terrible arguments, both before and after my instruction. And I suspect that some of that is because I go into the teaching of argument mainly looking to win arguments, which is one of my favorite things to do in the classroom. But it has definitely struck me that my students still make the same terrible arguments now that they did five, ten years ago. And I can’t take all the blame for that: much of it is because of the inherent problem with arguments, and the problems with social media, which is where they learn to argue, and where they find the topics they want to argue about.
I’ve recognized the problem with arguing on Twitter as Twitter has descended into the depths of Hell. I don’t even want to be on the site any more. Even worse, the more I interact with assholes on Twitter, the more money I make for them, because Musk pays them for their number of interactions. So why do I still go there to argue?
Okay, I tell myself that I am fighting the good fight: but a week or so ago, I was arguing about who was the greatest tennis player of all time. Which is – you may be surprised to hear – not one of the important arguments I need to take a stand on. I mean, it was related, because the original post had the pictures of four candidates for GOAT, and they were, as might be presumed, all white men – Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, Rafael Nidal, and Novak Djokovic. But the correct answer, of course, is Serena Williams. So I commented that, and like a few other comments that had made the same argument; and then I found this thread where someone had posted Serena’s unmatched statistics – better by far than any of those four losers – and someone else had replied that Serena would lost a head-to-head match to any of them. But that’s dumb. Because that’s not how you decide who the best of all time is. Nobody arguing about Michael Jordan vs. Lebron James talks about which of them would win a 1v1. You talk about their impact on the game, on their team; their championships, their individual statistics.
So I joined the thread and fought for my side. I made a joke (It was a stupid joke, but I thought it was funny) in order to mock the guy who had said Serena would lose head-to-head. And another guy started arguing with me: saying that I was wrong and dumb, because the way you decide who is the best of all time is exactly to debate who would win head-to-head, and even Serena has said she would lose against a male champion.
We went back and forth. For less time than some of my arguments about more serious topics, but still, this went on too long. And somewhere in there I realized: who decided how you debate the GOAT of a sport? Who says it isn’t about a head-to-head matchup? Did I have some special knowledge? Of course not: because actually, half the fight about who is the GOAT is arguing over which methods of comparison make the most sense. And in lots of these arguments, none of which is ever meaningful, the key point is indeed head-to-head. Boxing, for instance (which I had even referred to, because I’m a dummy), is almost always about head-to-head matchups, not statistics. So I had a bad argument, and was arguing in bad faith. And the worst part was that the other guy was funnier than me with his insults and comebacks. Which just pissed me off more – but since it didn’t make my argument better, I finally just quit.
He got the last word. And it was funnier. (Not really funny, to be clear. It was still a sexist argument, which I have problems with. But I tried to end with a barb, and he threw one back, and his was better than mine. Dammit.) Now, I still believe that Serena Williams is the best tennis player of all time – because she was more dominant in her specific competitive circumstance than Sampras or Federer or Nidal or Djokovic – but what did I gain by arguing for it?
Nothing. I just wasted my time. And I’m still wasting it, because I’m still arguing my point here, now, with you.
This is why I need to stop arguing online. And also why I need to stop arguing with my students. But then that brings me around to the title of this piece. What do I do now? If I’m not going to argue (And to be fair, I doubt I will ever stop arguing entirely; I still exist in this world, and people say some appallingly stupid shit; and also, I do think there is value in standing up for my beliefs and for the particular people I advocate for – but I have lately been stopping myself before I post, and deleting the comment, and scrolling away from the initial post that made me want to reply; so I’m getting better), what do I do? Nothing?
I don’t want to do nothing. I think there are fights that need to be fought. Even if I am a pacifist, because as I said at the top of this, even we pacifists need to fight bullies, or else we allow suffering and oppression and violence to grow and spread in the world. And I can’t abide that.
The obvious things I can do are: I can try to persuade people, without arguing; and I can take actual action, to try to create political change around the causes I believe in, to try to limit the power of fascists and bullies.
I plan to do both. The political action is going to wait, for now, because I have too much other shit going on; I’m writing a book, dammit. And one of the other facts that makes it easier for me to give up arguing now than it has been in the past is the fact that I have been fighting the good fight – victoriously or not – for a long time now. It’s like teaching: I still want to do it as well as I can, because my students today matter as much as those I taught twenty years ago; but in terms of my own sense of self-worth, I have already accomplished every good thing I could ever hope to accomplish as a teacher. I could retire now and feel satisfied with what I have done. (I can not retire now and continue eating and having electricity and so on.) So even if I don’t take action right away, I don’t feel bad, because I’ve done a lot of good things in my life. But causes today matter, so I do want to take an active role, in some small way; specifically, I hope to volunteer for the Democratic party, or simply for my local jurisdiction, to help with the 2024 election. Because make no mistake: the only way Trump and the Republicans can win is to cheat. Which doesn’t mean they will give up: it means they will cheat. And that means we need to stop them from getting away with it. I live in a battleground state with a strong pro-Trump Republican power structure; so my help is needed and important. I’m going to give it.
But right now, in my classes and on this blog and wherever I can, I’m going to try to do what I should have done a long time ago: I’m going to try harder to persuade people. Not to argue with them, not to prove them wrong and me right; not to get the best dig or the last word. To persuade them. A.R. Moxon persuaded me that persuasion is this:
“Preaching to the choir” is simply giving voice to an existing desire for truth, in a way that helps people see things in a way they already know to be true, but gives them the language, the pictures, the words, to keep knowing it. It brings the message to those receptive, rather than falling into the supremacist trap of viewing persuasion as proselytization, a competitive sport of one mind’s victory over another. It honors unpersuadable supremacists minds by leaving them eating the salad they’ve shat on, free to be persuaded any time they want to become persuadable.
I actually don’t think there’s much that is more persuasive than giving people language to understand things they already know are true, to help them in the real work of individual persuasion—new language, new frames, new pictures.
Having that picture helps to more clearly understand the things we already know.
Understanding it more clearly helps us believe it is possible.
Believing it is possible helps us expect it to happen, and understand that we can do it.
It’s not entirely new: I think I’ve been doing that for a long time. I think I have sometimes done it effectively. But I also think I could be a lot better at it, and a lot more thoughtful in my attempts to do it well. After all, I study and teach rhetoric – the effective use of language to achieve a goal – and I teach my students to examine the relationship between speaker and audience and subject, and the context, in order to determine what makes a piece of text effective. So why don’t I do that with my own writing? Because I’m busy telling that asshole that Serena Williams is a better tennis player than Novak Djokovic, who is just taller and stronger. Like that determines who’s better. Please. If that mattered, then Shaquille O’Neal would be a great basketball player, instead of the overlarge stooge I’ve been arguing he is for years.
Enough of that. Enough arguing. Enough fighting.
It’s time to try harder, and to think more. It’s time to do good.
Sorry this is coming in late (But also, my WordPress stats counter tells me that people are looking at my archive of old posts, and I have to say, there’s a lot there. So please feel free to look back through what I’ve written in the last 8 years on this blog) and it is only a link, not my words.
But. I have made a decision.
I am going to stop arguing. Online, at least.
In all the years that I have been arguing online, and arguing in person, and also hating myself for doing it, I have never been able to come to this decision, because I have always felt there is value in arguing the point, in standing up for my side. I don’t always see that value, because the internet is a terrible place for argument on the topics I generally argue, which are almost all political; but I have constantly told myself that there is value, and thus I need to keep doing it, even to my detriment.
Until I read this.
This is the culmination of a series of essays, which the author lists and links in this one; I recommend reading all of them — but also, he, like me, is wordy, so that’s a lot of sauce to drink down at once. Maybe just start with the one I’m linking. It’s on Substack, but it’s free to read. I will have more to say on this, which I’ll try to post next week on the usual day. For now, read this.
So my wife was interviewed by this website, because she is a wonderful artist and an interesting person; and then she recommended they interview me. Personally I think that was a mistake, but they did it anyway — and here it is. Please give it a read.
One of the difficult things about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing.
And one of the things I find most upsetting about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing which they learned from past English teachers. For instance: one should never start a sentence with “and” or “but.” One should never use the pronoun “I” in a formal essay, one should only refer obliquely to one’s self, preferably in the third person. One should use transitions for every paragraph in an essay, because they help the flow; and one cannot go wrong with the transitions “First,” “Second,” “Third,” and “In conclusion.” And, of course, every essay should be five paragraphs, and every paragraph should consist of at least five sentences, and every sentence should be at least — but actually, I don’t know what the drones tell students the proper minimum length for a sentence is; I would guess about 10 words. Also one should never use fragments or run-ons.
Ridiculous. All of it.
There are no rules.
One of my favorite days as an AP teacher is when I mention to my new students that they can now ignore these rules, for the rest of their writing lives, and that, in fact, if they should never use “In conclusion” again, nor limit themselves to five paragraphs as a structure for an essay, they will make me very happy. The relief is palpable — and sad. We constrain young writers so much: and it helps to crush their creativity and desire to use words, and that is an awful thing to do both to young people and to this language.
There are, I think, two reasons why teachers present these rules to their students as rules; and one of them is understandable, if not valid. The bad reason, the invalid one that is not understandable, is that teachers were taught these things themselves as rules, and they were never allowed to deviate from them, and so now these things are unbreakable rules: sacred cows, taboos never to be questioned, just like the prohibition on the use of the word “Fuck” (And all I really have to say about that is this). I was taught at least some of those things, too — though to be honest, I don’t remember learning them, so either I had genuinely good English teachers, or I spaced out at just the right time and never heard or cared about these rules — but come on. We grow up. We learn to think for ourselves. We see countless sentences that begin with “and” or “but.” We read countless pieces by authors who use “I” in even the most formal of essays. We stop counting words and sentences and paragraphs, and just — read. (I confess I still count pages. This, too, is a bad habit; but if we’re at the page-counting stage, at least the work is long enough that word counts and sentence counts and paragraph counts become moot.) WE FUCKING USE THE WORD “FUCK” WHEN IT IS APPROPRIATE: and we recognize that there are, in fact, many times, many times, when it is appropriate.
So why don’t teachers teach their students that all of these things are bad rules? For one (And damn me, I first wrote this sentence starting with “Well,” and I HATE when my students do that, answer their own rhetorical question starting with “Well.” I caught it, though. Also, that’s not a rule.), teachers do not always question authority. Teachers come from all groups and kinds and flavors of people, but the majority are those who loved school, who were the top students, and who want to pass those wonderful learning experiences on to other people; those people never challenged a teacher in their lives, they were the ones who argued back against the students who did challenge the teacher, the ones who said “Shut up, he’s the teacher, don’t argue with him!” in class when someone else said “That doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.” And then they become teachers, and they don’t want to be questioned by students — who, to be fair, are completely freaking annoying when they argue, because they are used to having their points of view denied, their arguments summarily contradicted, usually by adults who say “Because I said so, that’s why,” or some permutation of that (Like “Because I’m the teacher, so don’t argue with me.”), and so all they have left is making one irritating point and getting a reaction from the authorities who squash them into molds, every single day. But this all means that when an English teacher says that a paragraph has to have a minimum of five sentences, and a student asks, “Why five?” The teacher wants to respond with “BECAUSE I TOLD YOU SO AND I’M THE TEACHER AND MY TEACHER TOLD ME SO WHICH MEANS IT IS A TEACHER’S RULE SQUARED!”
I am not one of those teachers. I did not like school. I questioned authority as a teenager (and I was annoying about it) and I continue to do so now, three full decades out of my teens. So I expect my authority to be questioned; in fact, I invite it. I never say “Because I’m the teacher, that’s why.” (Though I do jokingly argue with students who question my spelling, “How dare you question your English teacher on spelling?!?”) So when I tell students that an essay needs to be longer, or that a sentence is incomplete, and they question me, I tell them why. But then, I’m weird; I like arguing. I like explaining. I like helping people understand why something needs to be changed, why it is incorrect. I think doing that makes the world more comprehensible, and therefore more manageable. I think making the world more manageable for my students is my job, a lot more than making them write five-paragraph essays.
The more understandable reason why teachers don’t tell students that these foolish rules for writing are not ironclad is more to do with arguments. Students like asking “Why?” Not always because they want an answer, either; but because they want to catch the teacher looking foolish, and they love to waste time and thereby avoid work. Sometimes, then, when they get the real answer, they’re not ready for it; so they don’t understand it, because they weren’t really listening — they asked the question only to make the teacher talk instead of assigning work, so when a teacher answers their question, the only response is “Huh?” So when you present one of these writing rules as they should be presented, as something that is entirely dependent on context and writing intention; that, for instance, the use of the word “fuck” in a formal essay, though not entirely forbidden (If you are quoting a character in a Martin Scorsese film, for instance, you have probably a 90% chance that any given quote will include “fuck,” and any form of censoring the word has a poor effect on the serious treatment of the film because it makes you seem too prudish to deal seriously with a movie that has profanity in it) does tend to contradict the tone of a serious essay, and is therefore jarring for the audience to come across in a context that doesn’t require the word be used; then you are going to get argument. Or stupid questions. Mostly stupid questions. (“Can we say it in class? Can I say it right now? Can I change my name to Fuckface McGee, and then you have to call me Fuckface all the time? Would you still say “fuck” if the principal was in the room?”)
So teachers, who deal with enough stupid questions as it is (And yes, by the way, there are stupid questions — see above), will often state an ambiguity as though it were in fact ironclad, just so they don’t have to argue with students. And since the argument won’t bear weight for the thing it is, we have to rely on even more annoying arguments which do have the advantage of shutting down debate: namely, “Because I’m the teacher and I said so.”
This is why, when I was in 3rd grade, the teacher told me that you could not take a larger number away from a smaller number, that 3-7=x didn’t make sense. Not because that was true, but because the teacher didn’t want to explain negative numbers to me right then. The same reason my mother, when I was 4 or so, told me, when I asked where babies came from and where specifically I had come from, that half of me was in my father and half of me was in her. And I assumed that meant that the bottom half of my body was inside one of them and the top half was in the other and they sort of stuck me together like a Gumby figurine (Don’t get that reference, kid? Look it up.), but also, the answer shut me up at the time, which was my mother’s goal.
I understand how annoying students are, so I understand teachers giving guidelines for good writing (It is a good idea to avoid saying “I” in formal essays for two reasons: first because talking about yourself personally is a way to connect emotionally with your audience, which is informal communication, not formal; and secondly because most of our desire as writers to use “I” is in phrases like “I think” and “I believe,” which we are tempted to use in arguments and statements of truth so that we don’t seem too arrogant, and so that we don’t seem dumb if we should be wrong. It’s safer to say “I think Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often,” than it is to say, boldly, “Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often.”) as if they were ironclad rules. It’s just that teaching these things as rules takes away all the nuance, all the flavor, from writing; it makes writing boring, which makes students not want to do it. It’s better to tell the truth, and deal with the consequences: there are no rules in writing that cannot be broken, it’s just a matter of what is the best use of language in a specific context.
And no, Jimmy, that doesn’t mean you can say “fuck” in your essay about Sacagawea.
So this went on much longer than I meant it to: this was meant only as an illustrative example, not as the heart of the essay. I really just wanted to talk about how we try to apply rules when there aren’t any rules, and shouldn’t be any rules, and that that is a problem. My main point wasn’t even about English: it was about life. Where there also aren’t any ironclad rules. That’s why I quoted the poem to start:
since feeling is first
by ee cummings
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world
my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
I love that poem. I did a podcast episode on it if you are interested in the whole breakdown of what it’s about and what cummings meant to say in this; but for now, I just want to focus on his first stanza and his last two lines — sort of his introduction and conclusion, one might say. (Though please note he does not use transitions between his — err — paragraphs. Especially not “in conclusion” before the last one.)
So the first stanza: since feeling is first, he starts with, which means either that feelings occur first, before thoughts or actions or understanding or anything else, or else that feelings are more important than anything else, probably with both thoughts connected; but clearly, feeling is better: because he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you. I love that, because “syntax” is such a nerdy English writing/grammar thing to talk about; it means the way things are organized to create meaning (words, specifically, but you can have a syntax of almost anything that is organized to create meaning), so word order in sentences and sentence order in paragraphs, and aspects like word length and the use ofpunctuation and so on; all of that is syntax. For the lines about the syntax of things and kissing, I think specifically of this scene from the movie Hitch, where Will Smith’s character tries to teach Kevin James’s character how to kiss: but in this scene, it’s not only about the syntax of kissing and of relationships, but it’s about math: and so though Smith tries to get James to think about the passion of the moment, he focuses so hard on the proper methodology that he does not show any passion at all — and then he loses control and flubs it.
The point is, there are not rules to kissing, and there is not math. And the more you think about rules and math and methodology for kissing, the less you are focusing on what you are feeling for the person you are kissing: and that means you are not kissing wholly. Because feeling is first.
So with that in mind, let’s talk about the last two lines, and what I originally set down to write about today.
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
I love this because it can mean a bunch of different things, and that’s what I like best about poetry: in order to distill the language down to its absolute minimum, just the essence, poets take out much of what is usually there to provide meaning to the audience; this leaves the audience having to fill in gaps, make guesses — bring their own understanding to the conversation. Because of that, poetry does a better job, in my mind, of presenting what literature is supposed to be: a conversation, not a monologue. An author is talking about things they have observed or experienced or imagined, and the audience is listening and then agreeing or disagreeing — and adding to what the author says. A poet leaves more silence for the audience to speak, so though the poet may say the same thing in every conversation, the audience always has something new and different to say — and so one monologue can turn into almost infinite dialogues. I love that.
(And because I am pedantic and wordy, I don’t write poetry, I write novels. Heh.)
But because these last two lines use the names of two syntactical structures — paragraph and parenthesis — these two lines connect to the opening stanza: it is telling us that there is no clear structure to a life, and there is not a simple punctuation mark at the end of life that tells us exactly how a life is to be thought of — and maybe my favorite idea present here when I read this is the idea that death makes life silent, makes it unimportant, like a parenthesis makes the words that it contains, turning them from a main thought into supplemental but unnecessary additions. We treat death too often like it is the most important factor in a person’s life. It is not. The life that precedes it is far more important than death.
But in either case, life is not a paragraph: it does not have a definite way that it is supposed to go, with a topic sentence to start (After a transition, of course), and then an illustration of the topic, and then two (or more) pieces of evidence or commentary on that topic, followed by a concluding sentence that shows the meaning or importance of this topic in the broader theme.
And then a parenthesis.
We think this way about life far too often. What actually set this whole discussion in motion for me was a conversation I had with my wife, in which she was railing against people who made decisions about how old other people should be to act certain ways, and how people should act based on what is appropriate for their age.
I am certain you have all had these conversations. Most if not all of you have also made these prescriptions for other people, and probably for yourselves as well. Right? I mean, we all know it: we know that 8-year-olds are too young for R-rated movies with sexual content, and we know that 11-year-olds are too young to drive — and teenagers are mostly too old for dolls and stuffed animals.
We know that 17 is too young to get married and have children, and that 50 is too old for those things. We know that 18 is old enough to make decisions for yourself, and 25 is when everything starts to go downhill. 40 is too old to buy a new sports car, because then it’s nothing but a midlife crisis; and the same with a second marriage to a younger person. And while we’re on that: 5 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 20, and 10 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 40, and two months is too much of an age difference when one of you is under 18 and the other is over 18 BECAUSE THEN THAT OLDER ONE IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR AND A PEDO AND SHOULD BE CASTRATED AND THEN FED TO WOLVES.
That last one is challenging: because I don’t mean to disagree that people under the age of consent should not have relationships with people who are older and may be taking advantage of them. But I do want to point out that the idea that the second someone hits 18 they are capable of taking care of themselves, and the second before that they are not, is absurd.
This goes for all of this. There are certainly stages of life and development, and some of them are appropriate for some things and some are not; I do not think that teenagers should be running the country. I know lots of teenagers. They would not be good at the job. But also, the idea that octogenarians are exactly the right people to be running the country is not more reasonable, based on my experience of octogenarians. Especially those running the country right now (and the septuagenarians who want to run the country right now. Not better.) But at the same time, almost every stereotype and bias we have based on age is belied by not just one exception, but by a whole slew of them. Ten years is a big age difference for a romantic relationship, especially in one’s 20s — except my wife and I met when I was 20 and she was just about to turn 30, and we’ve been together now for the same 29 years that she had lived before she met me. I think it’s worked out pretty well. My father and his wife had a ten-year age difference, but since they met when he was 50 and she was 40 (or thereabouts), and since the man was the older one, nobody thought anything of it. And then, although everyone assumed that she would take care of my father at the end of his life, that went exactly the other way, and he was her caretaker until she passed this last February.
Now my dad is 82, and alone. Should he find someone else to love? Or at least have a partnership with, if not a romantic connection? Or is there not enough time left for him to enjoy a relationship? Would it be too much of a burden for him to put on somebody else, to love him for only the few years he has left? Would it be inappropriate for him to date? To date someone younger? Someone older? How much older? How much younger? How much life left is enough to fall in love?
It this is too much of a dark theme, let me ask a few others ones: should my dad have a sports car? Should he have a fun car, like a bright orange VW bug? Should he get a pet, if he wants one? Should he wear a bathing suit in public? Should he dye his hair, if he wants to? Get a tattoo, or a piercing? Or is he too old for that now?
It struck me in thinking about this that we make exactly the same decisions about the very young and the very old: just as most people would see my dad, at 82, as being too old for a fast car or a fast woman, or a new career or a new hobby or a style change that included something hip and modern, so people would think the same about, say, a ten-year-old: that a ten-year-old should not be in a romantic relationship (I agree with that one) and should not have a car (Less certain on that one) and should not have a career path picked out (Don’t agree with that one: if a kid knows that young what they want to do, then mazel tov: my wife knew she wanted to be an artist before she was ten) and should not get their hair dyed or their body pierced (Other than the earlobes, which apparently are fine for stabbing — hey, does that mean a child could get their earlobes tattooed? Or is that shocking and inappropriate?) or wear makeup, or wear clothing that is hip and modern and stylish.
The way we bracket our lives, with the greatest constraints on the young and the old, turn those two stages of life, the beginning and the end, into — parentheses. We freeze both those times in our lives into immovable requirements: just like kids can’t wear makeup, and can’t possibly make decisions about their sexuality or their gender identity, women must get their hair cut short when they are older, and men have to start playing golf, and men and women both have to retire and may not begin a new job. Kids have to be cheerful and energetic, and old people have to be slow-moving and cranky. And anyone who doesn’t follow these rules, these iron-clad, unquestionable sacred cows, these taboos that are never allowed to change without disapproving frowns and pearl-clutching gasps, is deemed not only unusual or eccentric: but wrong. The butt of jokes, the target of angry stares and social ostracism. Because those are the rules: don’t question society, just do what you’re told.
But no. Because there are no rules. Look at ee cummings’s poem: there are no rules. None that he follows. And yet: it makes sense, even more sense than what most of us write, even though we may follow the rules in order to make our words make sense. The fact that some people are better off following the supposed rules doesn’t mean those rules have to make sense in that way for everyone. Like I said, there are certainly stages of life and development, and children should not be romantic and should not be required to be responsible and adult before they are ready to be; but beyond the most obvious age distinctions around puberty and adolescence, there is no rule that actually encompasses everyone. And there shouldn’t be. Some kids can handle driving a car. Some could write books or create musical masterpieces. Some can know just what they want to do with their lives. Some can wear makeup and have pierced ears, and make it look stylish and cool. And just the same, while older folk are physically more frail and should take that into consideration when picking new extreme sport hobbies (And let me note: kids should be careful about extreme sports, too — because they are also frail, or at least small and fragile.), there too, there are no rules that encompass everyone. If Tony Hawk gets on a skateboard when he’s 80 (if he lives that long — and let’s hope so, because he’s one of those people who is awesome on the Betty White end of the scale) then I’ll watch him drop into the halfpipe, and cheer when he pulls off a trick. Because he could: and even if he can’t, I’d be happy to let him try, if that’s what he wants to do. It’s his choice. It’s all of our individual choices, and none of society’s business as long as other people aren’t getting hurt. Sure, Tony Hawk at 80 would be in danger of hurting himself on the skateboard: but do you know how often he has hurt himself on a skateboard while he has been young? And then adult? And then middle aged? Right. We let him do it. Because it’s his choice. People should be allowed to do what they want, without the weight of social disapprobation because of their calendar age. It’s stupid.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
[Content warning: because people accuse liberals/teachers/LGBTQ+ people of committing sexual assault against children, I talk about that issue and those accusations.]
They keep saying it’s for the children. That’s why.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it on the dumpster fire that used to be called Twitter and is now (sort of) called X: some conservative putz of a commentator says something like “You know, I didn’t really care about [CRT or racial equity/LGBTQ people/sex education] UNTIL THEY STARTED COMING AFTER OUR CHILDREN. BUT THEN I HAD TO SAY ‘HELL NAW!’” See, that’s where we liberals crossed the line, they say: we went after their children.
And they want to protect the children. So they say. Over and over and over again, generally growing louder every time.
Now, I understand this. I want to protect children too: I want children to be free to exist as themselves without being hated or abused or ostracized. I want children to be happy. I want to help them create opportunities to achieve their goals in life, to be who they want to be; that’s most of the reason why I became a teacher and why I still do it, even after 23 years, even despite the ways that others (mostly conservatives) have tried to stop me from teaching. I want children to live: I won’t say that I would put my life on the line to save a child’s life, because I also want to live; but I would fight to save a child’s life. And I am a pacifist: I wouldn’t otherwise fight for anything. But I’d fight to protect a kid.
(Also I would fight to protect my wife or our pets. I’d lose, but I’d fight. Just sayin’.)
The truth is that liberals, along with schools, and Democrats, and LGBTQ+ people, are not “after” their children. Inasmuch as most of those groups of people want to help educate children, we are actually seeking to make children happier and stronger: not to take them, and not to harm them. Personally, I REALLY don’t want to take anyone’s children: I don’t want children. Not at my house.
But I’m being disingenuous here. They don’t think I’m after their children because I intend to kidnap them and take them home with me; that would be absurd. No: they think — at least they say, and yell, and scream — that I and everyone on the left, in schools, involved in LGBTQ+ issues, or even just someone in drag reading stories to their kids, are sexual predators. Pedophiles, who are grooming their children by exposing them to inappropriate material.
Let me be very, very clear here. Democrats and liberals and schools and LGBTQ+ people and those who fight for racial equity and all the rest are not in any way groomers or pedophiles. Of course there are pedophiles and abusers among every group, but there’s no particular reason to claim that they are more common on the left, and to say that any teacher who talks about gender or sex is grooming children in order to rape them means that I will punch you in the fucking face. Even though I’m a pacifist. Because fuck you if you think that, or you make that accusation. How fucking dare you? The one time I got a conservative to agree with me immediately was when, during a Twitter argument about something in education, some asshat called me a groomer and I blocked him; another conservative commenter asked, as conservatives are wont to do, why I had blocked him, saying something about how I was hiding from the argument; I said “No, I’ll argue with anyone all day about these issues — but if you break out that disgusting fucking pedophile/groomer slander about me, you can fuck right off forever.” He liked the comment and let the subject drop. Because fuck you if you actually think that. And I expect that rational people would see my point on this.
I recognize, of course, that all of you reading this are rational people who see my point on this. None of you reading this think that I or teachers in general are groomers; none of you reading this believe that, because I teach novels and short stories that relate to sexual activity or gender identity or anything along those lines, I am intending to make the students in my class easier to rape; but the whole disgusting fucking slander makes me just foam at the mouth with rage. I hope that’s understandable. That is, naturally, the goal; it’s hard to debate the issues when someone is accusing you of raping children, and it’s harder when their evidence is a gross and appalling and absurd misinterpretation — an intentional misinterpretation — of what you actually do. Because then I feel like I have to start justifying the things I do, like teaching a book that might have a sex scene in it or might talk about gender roles, to show unequivocally how wrong they are: as if there’s any justice in claiming, for instance, that To Kill a Mockingbird (which does have a “romantic” [actually it’s sexual assault] scene involving sexual touching, and also accusations of rape and hints of incestuous sexual abuse, and does question gender roles pretty extensively through the character of the ‘tomboy’ Scout) is actually intended as a way to make it easier to rape children; and it’s even harder to walk away and refuse to dignify their slander with a response, which is the right thing to do, but then that fucking asshole is back there still calling me a groomer and I have to ignore him rather than punching him in the fucking face.
But their goal is to make me lose the argument, or even better, walk away, leaving them alone on the soapbox, because I’m so pissed off about what they said to me that I can no longer address the argument they are making. And it’s effective: because here I am dignifying this bullshit with a response, and speaking to people who know better. But I can’t help it. It upsets me.
It’s upsetting to be someone who spends so much of my time and energy, so much of my life, trying to help and also protect children, and then to have people, generally for crass political gain, use my own dedication against me by claiming that my very desire to help children implies that I want to rape them. And for them to justify these attacks, these various attempts to take apart our democracy and our education system, along with that disgusting slander, by saying they are — protecting the children.
It’s been happening a lot. It’s very upsetting to me.
So I wanted to talk about it some. Because I don’t want to leave conservatives alone talking on the issues here because I’m too mad to speak.
(Another caveat: I do know that not all conservatives support these arguments, and certainly not all conservatives make those disgusting accusations. All I can say is: it sucks to be stereotyped, doesn’t it?)
But let’s focus for now on the actual arguments.
So first, the argument that CRT and similar (intentionally misinterpreted) ideas are taught in schools and that this is damaging to children hearing about these ideas. We all know, I hope, that CRT, Critical Race Theory, which is a framework used to describe TO LAW STUDENTS IN GRAD SCHOOL how the historical institutions of racism in this country have made it harder for equitable outcomes to exist in the modern era, is not taught in any K-12 public school in this country. But that’s not the main point, just like arguing over whether the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” is not the main point in a gun control debate, is only in fact a red herring. (By the way, if you ever are arguing about gun control with someone who cares about this particular nonsense, it stands for Armalite Rifle. ArmaLite was the company that originally designed the weapon.)
The real objection is not to CRT, it is to teaching the idea that the US is a racist nation, and that historical racism has impacts on the world today. Conservatives don’t like hearing people say that this nation is a bad place, or that it has done bad things to people, or especially that it continues to do bad things to people. They think that we are united in our love for our country, and that’s how it should be.
But the problem is, we’re not united in our love for our country, we are united in our love for the ideals our country represents for us. And we should all be appalled by the corruption of those ideals in our country’s actual actions and impact on the world. We are supposed to be a country that stands for liberty: and instead we promote the oppression of billions of people around the world, in various ways — from subsidizing economic slavery in every poor nation that makes our shoes and electronics, to allowing climate change to devastate people’s homes and livelihoods because we won’t fucking stop driving Ram 35000s, to directly overthrowing democratic governments because they stand in the way of our economic exploitation, or because they are, in our sordid little fanatic-minds, associated with the greatest enemy of the corruption of our actual ideals: Communism/Marxism/socialism.
Speaking of red herrings. This one is the reddest: and it has thrown us completely off the rails for coming up on a century now. We have, literally, assassinated political leaders, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, because we thought they would create a stable Communist/Marxist/socialist state, and for some goddamn reason, we can’t let that happen. We’re supposed to be about liberty? Us? We’re supposed to believe in free expression, and live and let live, and the free marketplace of ideas — and yet we have to stamp out Communism/Marxism/socialism wherever it exists, both in our “free” nation and in other nations? Somehow that became our most important ideal, around the world: the nation that supposedly stands for liberty actually stands for taking it away from anyone who uses that liberty to freely choose Communism/Marxism/socialism. And why? Because we don’t defend liberty: we defend capitalism.
Sorry: I got off the topic of racial equality, and historical racism and institutional racism. So feel free to go back over everything I just said, and wherever I talked about Communism/Marxism/socialism, go ahead and replace those words with “racial equity,” and the word “capitalism” at the end with “institutional racism.” All still true. We have contributed to the oppression of free people, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, and assassinated leaders, because those situations and people promoted racial equity in some form; and this country defends institutional racism, and always has. Almost every evil and disgusting thing we have ever done as a nation also has a racist element to it.
One of the more amazing examples I know of how appalling and unrepentant we are about our racist culture is the running argument in modern partisan bullshit about which political party is more racist: is it the Republicans, who support racist policies? Or the Democrats, who used to support even more overt racist policies? Or both parties, who participate in institutional racism even while either decrying it or claiming it doesn’t exist?
You know what? FUCK WHO IS MORE RACIST, LET’S JUST STOP BEING RACIST! What do you say? How would that be? And you know who that would help?
The children. Who really shouldn’t have to grow up in a racist world, and who shouldn’t be taught to believe racist ideas. Like the idea that the United States, which is unequivocally guilty of countless racist acts including multiple genocides, is not actually a racist nation. Do we not see how pretending that this country is innocent of harm is one of the most harmful racist things we could do? That that pretense not only allows the harm to continue, but also states clearly that the past harms don’t matter? Which could only be true if the people who were harmed did not matter?
The problem with trying not to teach these ideas in school — that the US is a nation with racist institutions that came from a historically racist past and foundation — means we can’t teach the truth. And as Fox Mulder (not the Fox News Channel; Mulder is the reliable one) told us, the truth is out there: which means kids are going to learn it eventually. And that’s when they’ll realize that not only has this country been racist in the past, it still is now: because the people now tried to cover up that racist past.
Trust me. I had that experience. I grew up in Newton, a wealthy suburb of Boston; and not until college did I learn that Boston was where the last and worst riots — actual fucking riots, that is — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis] over desegregation of schools occurred in the 1970s. 40 riots. Carried out by white people, in the place where I grew up.
Gee, I wonder if they were as bad as the BLM riots of 2020. They certainly were not precipitated by the police murder of an innocent man like the BLM riots were. They were caused by a bunch of racist people who didn’t want people of other races in their kids’ schools.
Nobody in my schools told me that. Which is — let’s use the word “interesting,” because a lot of my teachers had been teaching, in Newton, for 20 or 30 or 40 years. I graduated in 1992, which means my teachers? They were there. Not all of them, of course, but some of them were. And nobody told me about it. So when I learned about the Boston bussing riots, how do you think I felt about my teachers?
I lost faith in them, a little. I realized that some of them were racists.
Shall I mention here that nobody in my high school was LGBTQ+? 1600 students, and not a one of them was gay or bisexual.
To be clear, literally hundreds of them were gay or bisexual or in some way queer; but none of them were out, none of them were open about it: because they would have had the shit beaten out of them, if they were not actually murdered. My hometown was not welcoming to LGBTQ+ people. I wasn’t, either: one of my most distasteful moments is when, in the middle of the hilarious and silly home movies my friends and I made in high school, we burst casually into multiple homophobic slurs and jokes. Just a stream of them, many coming directly from my mouth. I hate it.
But that’s how I was raised: not thinking that any of these issues were real, that the people who lived them were real people; or at least that they didn’t involve ME or MY town or the people I knew. All of that was, y’know, somewhere else, and in the past, racism in the South before the 60s and homosexuality and so on in San Francisco.
Never heard of Stonewall, either. Not until after college, even. And before I lived in Newton, I lived on Long Island. A suburb of New York City. Though of course, I wouldn’t have heard about the Stonewall riots then; I moved when I was in 3rd grade, and you can’t tell a 3rd grader about race riots.
You sure can tell him about war, though. The Shot Heard Round the World, and the Minutemen plugging away at the Redcoats. Cowboys shooting Indians. Allies fighting the Nazis. Cops fighting robbers. Pretty sure I heard about some of that before I was 8.
So the point is, when you conceal the truth, you open yourself up to the righteous and deserved accusation of — being someone who lies to hide the truth. And what reason could you have for hiding the truth other than — something nefarious that probably includes a continuation of the problem that led to the truth you concealed? Only racists would want to hide the truth about racism, because they want to minimize the reality in order to maintain it, or because they think the victims are not deserving of consideration — which is a racist idea. I never heard about the Japanese internment during World War II, either.
I mean, maybe my high school education just kinda sucked. I admit I didn’t pay all that much attention.
But the point is that I did learn the truth later, and it made me lose faith. And rightfully so.
But on the other hand: my dad told me, when I was a kid, that his mother, my grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and it had caused my father a lot of pain and a lot of problems in his life. He told me that he was attending AlAnon meetings — actually they were mainly meetings of a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics, which was the heart of the issue; but he had also, at one point, gotten concerned about his own drinking, so he went to some AlAnon meetings, too. And he told me about it. Which gave me great and abiding faith in my father: in his honesty, in his courage, in his respect and concern for me, for our family, for himself. I was inspired by his willingness to tell me the truth of the problems that he faced, and by his willingness to try to address them. I still am.
The same goes for issues not of race, but of sexuality: and here, as with race, let me point out that many children have an experience I did not have, which is recognizing that they themselves are the secret that is being concealed, that is being ignored. I learned that my nation’s history was concealed from me — or whitewashed; I graduated in the same year as the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, in a city that has strong Italian roots, and so as you may imagine, my understanding of Columbus was… incomplete — but I never had to recognize that the person telling me that racism wasn’t really an issue was ignoring my own lived experience of racism, or that the person telling me that men should only love women was denying my own right to exist and be myself. But the larger point is the same: if we pretend that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, or that they are somehow less real than cis-het people (because queerness is contagious, is taught, is socially constructed and influenced; not like the “natural” and “normal” sexuality of the dominant paradigm [NB: I am writing bullshit to represent what other people think; that statement I just wrote is not true.]), then the LGBTQ+ people who are listening — anywhere between 3% and 10%, or up to 20% if you recognize the more different aspects of sexuality we have been recognizing and learning about for the last few decades, which means in my high school of 1600 people there were anywhere between 50 and 300+ people who were LGBTQ+, only in one year of the four I was there — will recognize that we are lying. And the only reason why we would lie is because we want to do LGBTQ+ people harm, or we deny their right to know the truth about themselves and their world. And both of those are, to be clear, very, very, bad. Telling people they don’t exist or don’t matter is not how you protect the children. Lying to children in order to convince them that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist: that’s where I’m not sure how we can even conceive that we are protecting them. What exactly is the danger to children in the existence of LGBTQ+ people?
And here, exactly right here, is where we get to that disgusting fucking slander: because they have to invent a danger in order to conceal the truth: that there is no danger to protect children from, it’s just that the people who don’t want children to learn about gender or sexuality are bigots and homophobes, and they want to continue and promote their hate. That’s all.
By the way: my school, 1600 students? I think about 20 of them were Black. They all rode a bus to Newton North from Boston. I never heard about why. I just remember thinking that they were being given an opportunity for a better education in the rich white school in the rich white suburb. A thought I never confronted or analyzed. Because my racist environment tried to put racist ideas into me. I am thankful that my parents were not racist, and so did not encourage the growth of those ideas in me, and that I was later educated in a more open-minded and free environment, where I did learn the truth.
You know what’s another thought that bothers me, now? My parents unquestionably chose a town to live in because it had a good school district, and good property values, and a low crime rate, and all of the other proxies by which people in this country choose predominantly white-skinned, white-collar neighborhoods. And though I don’t for a moment think they thought about sticking with a white community, I don’t think they confronted or analyzed those thoughts, or the reasons why that town was the safest and richest and best educated. They just picked Newton, even though my dad’s job which brought us to Massachusetts from Long Island (Also an extremely white enclave on the edge of a more racially diverse city) was based in Cambridge.
To be fair, Cambridge is pretty close to Newton. I’m just saying: they fitted us comfortably into a privileged environment, and that’s how I grew up. Oblivious to the truth. Sheltered. Safe. And, if I had not learned the truth, I suspect I would have ended up racist. I surely had enough bigoted ideas and behaviors when I lived in Newton.
So. Keeping these issues, these truths, out of schools is not about protecting the children: it is about protecting racism. I’m not saying that people who try to protect children are aware of what they are doing to protect and promote racism, any more than my parents were aware of the consequences of putting me in such a sheltered white enclave; but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak: the result of these policies is bigotry, not safer children. As proven, I hope, by the fact that people have to invent slanderous attacks on teachers in order to justify their crusade.
The same is true of all the other crusades that are ostensibly taken on to protect children: the attempt to eliminate gender-affirming health care, which helps save the lives of trans children, and the concurrent attempt to deny the existence of trans children by keeping them from playing games with other children (Because calling those games “sports” doesn’t make them not games. They are children’s games. And people in this country are trying as hard as they can to stop some children from playing the game. Because that’s how much we suck. And then we crow about being the land of the free? And the home of the brave? Where we’re afraid of a trans kid?), are not intended to protect children, and they do not protect children: they help to destroy children, their happiness and their complete understanding of themselves and their world, if not their actual lives. The attempt to keep children from getting free lunch, which isn’t even supposed to help children other than the vague “protect them from drowning in debt” while we continue to pay nearly a trillion dollars a year for the military that is not currently fighting any wars, and we cut taxes for billionaires and subsidize toxic industries, while we ignore climate change and don’t talk about how that will lead to the world’s children literally drowning in rising ocean waters, is not even deserving of refutation. The attempt to keep parents in absolute control of their children’s education is not actually protecting children either: it is protecting those parents from having children who might disagree with them, or who might ask questions the parents don’t want to answer. And it is creating the danger for those children of living in a country that is less safe and less open, because it would be less educated — since “school choice” is just the choice to choose worse schools. If you want to make schools better, then make schools better: don’t make it easier to leave them and go somewhere else. I work for a charter school. It isn’t better than a traditional public school. Trust me.
And then there’s the big one: the most important and dominant wedge issue, the one that has made people pick sides, and plot and plan and center their entire lives, political and otherwise, around this one single topic: abortion. Because conservatives want to ban abortion, in all cases, whatever compromise they may temporarily accept about the life of the mother or cases of rape or incest; whatever lies they tell about states’ rights and judicial activism while they try to impose federal , national, judicial injunctions on birth control and chemical abortifacients — and they say they are doing it to protect the children. The children who their mothers murder, they say. Innocent children. It’s all for the children.
Except it’s not.
Never mind the points that have been raised for fifty years, about how the same conservatives who argue for saving children’s lives by banning abortion, also argue against those children having free lunch at school, or even a school to have a free lunch at. Never mind the very clear truth that the best way — the only way — to lower abortion rates is to improve both sex education and access to birth control, both of which conservatives oppose because they think, somehow, by keeping children from a knowledge of sex, they will stop those kids from having sex. Which doesn’t work any better than protecting children by keeping them shielded from knowing the truth about history, or about sexuality and gender, and which does just as much harm as all such lies do. Personally I am grateful that my mother, saying clearly, “Well, I don’t want to tell you about that stuff, so I’m glad they will” while signing my permission form to get sex ed in my elementary school, understood that I needed to learn about sex, even though she didn’t want to talk to me about it; if she hadn’t done that, I might have been left with the knowledge of how sex worked which I gained from my friend Benjy when we were 9 — and suffice it to say, Benjy did not have the straight dope about how sex worked. I will also say, that several years later when I understood how sex worked physically but not the harm it could do emotionally, it was a story my mother shared about her past experiences that showed me why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing — so even though she was uncomfortable with it, my mother had the honesty and the honor to tell me the truth, and the courage, as well; and that gave me even greater respect for my mother.
But never mind all of that. Here is how we know it is not about the children. Because when Judge James Ho wrote his opinion in the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision regarding the limitation of mifepristone, he showed us that the abortion arguments of the right are not about the children. We always knew they were not about the women, not about the mothers, that the entire argument showed a callous and wanton disregard for the rights, the sovereignty, the simple human value of the women whom conservatives want to force to bear those precious children to term: but Judge Ho showed us that it’s really all about — the men.
Judge James Ho, who was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018 (Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was also there), wrote his own opinion in the case in order to expand on what he sees as “the historical pedigree of Plaintiffs’ conscience injury, and to explore how Plaintiffs suffer aesthetic injury as well.”
Antiabortion doctors suffer a moral injury when they are forced to help patients who have complications from the use of mifepristone, Ho wrote, because they are forced to participate in an abortion against their principles.
Those doctors also experience an aesthetic injury when patients choose abortion because, as one said, “When my patients have chemical abortions, I lose the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” Indeed, Ho wrote, “It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”
In cases where the government “approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy…animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy,” that injury “is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval. And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs [that is, the antiabortion doctors] have an interest.”
“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients—and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”
So. Now we know. Conservatives don’t want to protect the children. They want to protect their right to possess those children. To treat them as spectacles, as attractions; as something that exists for the adults to admire, to appreciate, to enjoy. To use. To own.
That’s what all of this is about. Control: treating children as the property of their parents, of the conservative leaders. I’ve seen the point made, in regards to the abortion debate, that the unborn are the perfect special interest to fight for: because they have literally no demands, no requirements, no arguments of their own: they don’t even exist as separate human beings. Conservatives never have to confront them, never have to talk to them, never have to treat them as their own people who might disagree with the politicians who work so hard to “protect” them. Using children, conservatives can promote their own agenda, and always, always, claim the moral high ground — because they are protecting children. Closing down and militarizing the border isn’t because we are racist and want to deny entry to people who aren’t white; we’re protecting children from fentanyl. Shutting down schools isn’t because we recognize that educated people tend to lean liberal politically (almost as if the truth pushes people in that direction); it’s because we’re protecting the children. Destroying the lives of women isn’t because we are essentially misogynist and supremacist: it’s because we want to protect — okay, actually, that one really is all about us; it’s because we like seeing the little pink babies. We think they’re cute. And so we feel that women should be enslaved in order to produce more of them for us to make goo-goo noises at.
So say the conservatives. And again, I realize and admit that not all conservatives feel this way — but those who don’t agree with the policies and arguments I have described here, also don’t separate themselves from those policies and arguments. Do they?
And me?
I make my job much, much harder than it has to be because I honestly do not like telling children what to do. It might be different if I taught the younger children: but the children I teach are nearly adults. I know that they have minds of their own, and wills of their own, and desires and dreams of their own: because they tell me about those things, they show them to me, on a daily basis. And I cannot stand the thought that I would take away any of that, their dreams or their abilities or their thoughts or their wills, simply to replicate my own thoughts or my own desires through them. I hate that thought. Even when it would be a good idea, I hate it.
Because they are not my children. They are themselves.
That is the message I want to give to conservatives, in the end. You do not own children. You can try to protect them — preferably from actual threats — but you cannot control them. They are not yours to do with as you will, not even when you want to guide and shape and mold them into people you think they should be. It is not up to you who they should be. It is up to them. If they cannot decide for themselves now, then you still do not have a right to decide for them: all you can and should do is help them get to the stage where they can decide for themselves. You cannot, and should not, keep the future decision hidden from them, even if you hold back all the details until they are ready for them.
And you know who decides when they are ready to hear all the details? They do.
Your children are not your children. They are their own.
So! Just as with last week, when I presented the essay I wrote during my AP Literature class, followed by the essay I wish I had written instead; here is the essay I wrote during my AP Language class; and tomorrow I hope to post the essay I should have written instead of this one. (I may need a little extra time to finish the rewrite on this one, because it requires some research, and this has been a busy weekend.)
This essay is the Synthesis Prompt. The concept here is entering into a debate: the students are given six sources of information, which divide mostly evenly into two groups, one on either side of a controversial issue of some kind. The students are to synthesize information from these sources and present the two sides of the debate, and their own opinion on the topic — which can be on both sides, either side, or neither side.
The topic this year was urban rewilding, which is the practice of taking back some developed areas in a city and turning them into natural ecosystems, planting native plants and trying to encourage wildlife to live in the area, as well. This can take the form of anything from a rooftop or a vertical garden, to reclaiming vacant lots or empty buildings and turning them into natural green spaces. And while in most years, the topics don’t have a definitely “correct” or “incorrect” side — two years ago the question was about whether schools should teach cursive, which, good grief, who cares — this topic had such a clearly correct side that even the sources weren’t really on both sides: four of them were correct, and two of them were, well, sort of weaseling.
To be clear: the correct side is in favor of urban rewilding. The concrete tombs that we call cities are in desperate need of greenery, and our world is in desperate need of plants that can capture and sequester and convert more carbon dioxide, and the natural world needs not to be driven into extinction by our destruction of habitat.
And that was my problem: as I was reading the sources, I was looking for the two sides, and I just couldn’t find one of them. Not that I would argue against urban rewilding no matter what, but I couldn’t even take that side seriously. So by the end of reading the sources, I came to a decision: I was going to argue for neither side, with the appearance of arguing for the wrong one.
I don’t know that this is a bad argument, but it is not the argument I would like to make. It was fun to write, though, so here it is. Enjoy. If I can get my research done, I will write an argument stating why we should clearly, obviously, promote urban rewilding everywhere we can.
Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. Many cities around the world have embraced rewilding as part of larger movements to promote ecological conservation and environmentally friendly design. Now, a movement to promote urban rewilding is beginning to take shape in the United States as well.
Carefully read the six sources, including the introductory information for each source. Write an essay that synthesizes materials from at least three of the sources and develops your position on the extent to which rewilding initiatives are worthwhile for urban communities to pursue.
Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. It’s becoming more popular, and so the debate is heating up: is it worth putting effort into this? It seems like a positive concept, a valuable endeavor — but is it worth the effort? Would it be prohibitively expensive? Worse: could it be that this is only window dressing?
The answer is something else entirely. Urban rewilding is evil. It promotes precisely the wrong goal, by trying to bypass the actual issue. The actual issue is humanity. We are a blight upon the Earth, and we should be destroyed. Then and only then — when the last living human has returned to earth and dust — should our cancerous pustules, the monstrous toxic boils we call cities, be “rewilded” by the natural processes that will devour our waste as they devour our worthless corpses. [I am terribly disappointed in myself that I didn’t finish the “boils” metaphor by talking about lancing and draining the pus. Ah, well. Next time!]
“More than 70% [of] projected extinctions of plants and animals would be counteracted by restoring only 30% of priority areas,” the infographic in Source A tells us. Sure, that seems like a wonderful trade-off — but it still includes the extinction of 30% of the species projected to die by our actions. You know what would preserve 100% of species that would otherwise go extinct thanks to human action? The extinction of the human race. Come on now: if 70% of species are worth saving by limiting humans, aren’t 100% of species worth saving by eliminating humans? Wouldn’t we trade 100% of species for the loss of only one? Of the worst one? This trolley problem isn’t even a problem.
Source B, I think, shows the heart of the issue: we are the most short-sighted, selfish, superficial beings imaginable. The idea here is to grow more life, more nature, inside our dark, dingy, dangerous, disgusting urban sprawls — and yet this policy brief feels it must sell this concept to the public. “Rewilding is a powerful new term in conservation,” it says. “This may be because it combines a sense of passion and feeling for nature with advances in ecological science. The term resonates. Rewilding is exciting, engaging, and challenging.” Look at that: saving the planet, living in a natural setting, respecting our fellow beings by not slaughtering them wholesale so we can build another goddamn Walmart: those appeals are not enough! Noooo, we need to market the brand, we need to sell it, we need to convince people. How disgusting is that? How disgusting are we?
Source C continues this. It presents a delightful scene of a friendly scientist helping the audience think back to their childhood: before they became polluters and exploiters of the natural world, when they were innocent (if we ever truly have been) and actually loved nature. Because, the TV host says, “if [we] don’t spend any time outside, why are [we] going to care about [our] local places let alone the national parks in the distance?”
WHY ARE WE GOING TO CARE?! Because this is not our world! Nature does not belong to us, we belong to nature! We need nature, it doesn’t need us! The graph in Source E shows it: more nature means less depression, less stress. Even we are happier when we don’t live in the world we are building. We destroy everything in order to benefit ourselves, and in so doing? We destroy ourselves. Even our attempts to remedy this, like Dr. Scott’s presentation in Source C, are performances given on television: they are artificial. Attempts to trick people into associating SAVING THE PLANET with some happy childhood memory of climbing a damn tree. Because without that emotional manipulation, without that chicanery, we would be far more likely to simply wipe out all life: including ourselves.
Well. We should skip the middle step, and jump straight to the end game. If all humanity were reduced to windblown ash, then the rest of the natural world — the healthy part, the good part — could flourish, once more. Urban rewinding is clearly not the answer: even at its best, as presented in Source F, it can only create 600 hectares of parkland in Madrid, one of the biggest cities in Europe; or 300 km of park connectors in Singapore, one of the greatest sprawls in the world of human filth. Is it worth pointing out that even those attempts at rehabilitating the human virus focus primarily on the wealthy? That Toronto’s Beltway features “farmers’ markets, performance spaces, and a children’s garden,” but not a single breath of fresh air and a flash of green life for the poorest slums in the city?
No. It doesn’t matter. We are not worth saving, if we have to think this hard about saving our planet. I just hope that we are the first to go, so everything else can go on without us. To that end, let’s forget about urban rewilding: let’s just build ourselves to death.
Here you go, the answer I should have written for the prompt I gave my AP Lit students this week.
Maybe.
AP English Literature and Composition 2023 Free Response Question #3:
Many works of literature feature a rebel character who changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs in the text. They may break social norms, challenge long-held values, subvert expectations, or participate in other forms of resistance. The character’s motivation for this rebellious behavior is often complex.
Either from your reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the complex motivation of the rebel contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.
How does one become a rebel?
It seems like a simple question, but I don’t think it is. There is one obvious way that one could become a rebel: one could be made into a rebel by the sudden appearance or dominance of an authority that takes away the freedom or the lifestyle that one was familiar and comfortable with; if another country invaded this one and overthrew my government and imposed Draconian laws on me, I would rebel against that invader. But first, that seems uncommon; though there have certainly been such invasions and takeovers in the past, they are not the norm; and second, “rebel” implies that there is an established authority, an accepted norm, which the rebel then fights back against — if there is an invasion and a conqueror, then really one who fought that would be a freedom fighter, not a rebel. The invading conqueror would call you a rebel, sure, but only because they want to pretend their power grab was legitimate; and that’s just propaganda.
If you are not conquered by an outside force, then either you were born a rebel, and had to grow up under the established authority, which would make it hard to stay rebellious as they would pressure you, all the time, from all sides, to conform to what is accepted; or the oppressive regime had to grow slowly, over time, getting worse and worse — and then the question becomes, what would be the final straw? What would push you, at the last, from grumbling about the government, to fighting back against the government? Sometimes there may be a sudden shift, a surprise attack that would move the needle well beyond what was acceptable all of a sudden; but I think most authority doesn’t work that way — and surely social conventions do not. The American Revolution was motivated by a long serious of usurpations and abuses, according to the Declaration of Independence; though the American Civil War kicked off after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, there were a hundred smaller elements of the conflict before that. So why was one of the earlier actions of the authority not the one that set off the rebellion? Why was it not a later one? What makes the last straw the last straw?
Those, I think, are not easy questions to answer. But I surely would like to know, not least because I am an authority figure in a classroom full of naturally rebellious people; and not least because I live in a country that at times seems to be sliding slowly into tyranny, one which I will not accept — but where will I draw the line? What is the right place to draw the line?
In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the protagonist Guy Montag becomes a rebel. But he does not start that way. In fact, Montag lives his entire life, until 30 years of age, not only accepting the norms and authorities that control him, but actively participating, encouraging, defending those norms and that authority: Montag is a fireman in a society where firemen, formerly rescuers, are now tasked with eliminating the possibility of rebellion, by destroying free thought and free thinkers. In the novel, the society — an American society set some number of centuries in the future — uses the particular oppressive mechanism of ignorance: they have banned, and now routinely destroy, all books. Montag burns books. It is the first thing that happens in the story, and even more, we immediately know that Montag loves it: the first line of the book is “It was a pleasure to burn.” Even later, when he has changed and is working against the oppressive society that raised him, he still loves burning, he still loves destruction; he still turns to it as a solution to his problems, even though he knows it doesn’t work. But old habits die hard: and that’s my point about rebellion. If a rebel, like Montag, grew up in the oppressive regime, how would they maintain their will to fight back, for their whole lives? Montag has the seed of rebellion in him even before the events of the book bring it to fruition: he steals books that he is supposed to burn, and keeps them; he has been doing this for a year before the novel’s plot begins, and has twenty or so illicit books inside his house. He also fails to report a book reader he meets in a park, simply keeping his name and address in his own personal files, even though in the encounter he knew the old man had a book of poetry in his pocket. So even before the book starts, Montag is not entirely conformist, not completely comfortable with who he is and the world that has made him this way: but he does not at first rebel against it. He does end up subverting expectations, by turning on the very society he helps prop up; but before that, he had to conform to the expectations before he could subvert them. And which act is more significant? If I spend ten years kicking your ankles, and then one day get you an ice pack for your bruises — and I now the good guy? Is Montag?
Clarisse, on the other hand, has always been a rebel: we are told that this young woman, Montag’s neighbor, has always been different, has never fit in. And we can see the cost of that: she is being watched carefully, along with her whole family, by the government, Fire Captain Beatty reveals to us; Clarisse tells us that she has been often kept out of school and has to report to a psychiatrist to make her act “right.” She says that she doesn’t really have any friends among her peers, because children her age scare her: bereft of the empathy and broader perspective that reading books can provide, along with the other results of living under an oppressive tyranny, the young people in this world are savage and violent, killing people for fun. Clarisse is different, and her difference has an effect on Montag: when she speaks to him, in a way that is not any longer an accepted and conventional way of speaking to people, she inspires in him a curiosity that drives him to try to learn things he didn’t know before. This is certainly part of what makes Montag a rebel: but it is also probably part of what kills Clarisse, who vanishes early on in the book, never to return; we are told she was killed in a car accident, which is probable, considering how the people act and how they drive; but also, maybe the government removed a threat to their control over the people.
So why isn’t that done to Montag?
It makes sense that he would be driven to fight back once he realizes that Clarisse had shown him how terrible his world is; but why does he realize that? He responds more honestly and openly to Clarisse when she starts speaking to him; she comments on it. But wouldn’t that imply he was willing to speak to the “crazy” people like Clarisse before, and just never got caught at it? Why didn’t he get caught? Captain Beatty knows right away that Montag has been speaking to Clarisse. It’s one of the great things about this novel: the ruling power structure is not stupid, and are more than capable of discovering and eliminating threats to their hold on power. 1984 makes the same point, even more effectively, because in that book, Big Brother wins — which raises the question of just how rebellious is Winston Smith?
How rebellious is Montag? Are you rebellious if you fail?
Clarisse was rebellious in following her passions and her curiosity, exploring her world, speaking to people as she wanted to, rejecting the mind numbing activities and schooling that keeps all of her peers asleep in their own lives; in all of that, she rebels, and is successful at it. But she never even thinks about attacking the power structure: she just wants to stay alive. That makes sense to me. Faber, too, the old man in the park with a poetry book whom Montag did not turn in, is somewhat rebellious in mind and heart: he has considered ways that the power structure could be fought, mostly eliminating impossibilities — which shows how existing effective power structures become incredibly adept at preventing rebellion — but keeping a couple of tricks up his sleeve; when Montag comes to him looking for help and advice, Faber is able to give Montag at least a little bit. But he doesn’t actually help. He advises Montag against taking action. He refuses to do anything more than talk to Montag while Montag takes all the risks. I don’t know how rebellious that is, though Faber is rebel-adjacent, at least.
But that only occurs because Montag refused, on a whim, to turn Faber in when he should have, and now Montag has a desire to rebel — and no idea how he should actually do it.
So what pushed Montag to rebellion?
He mentions a few experiences: Clarisse’s death, after her friendship with Montag, is certainly one. Another is that Mildred, his wife of ten years, overdoses on pills right at the beginning of the book; the clear depiction of this in the novel is that overdoses like hers are incredibly common — the hospital doesn’t admit her, instead sending technicians to her home to pump her stomach and filter her blood, and when Montag asks why there isn’t a doctor there to help her, they laugh and say that’s not necessary, all they need is the machines and two plumbers. And they do treat her like a broken toilet, for whom they don’t care one way or another: because Mildred is nothing special, just like all the other people who live or die in this world. So Montag recognizes the heartlessness of his society, separate from Clarisse’s example. But also, when the firemen talk about how they use the Mechanical Hound, a robot who tracks fugitives by smell and kills them with a massive overdose of opiates, to alleviate boredom by setting it to kill one of a small group of animals released in a closed space, betting on which one will get caught and killed, Montag mentions how he stopped participating in that practice some time ago. So did he have empathy before? How? If it was strong enough to affect him, how did he not get caught showing unseemly feelings for his fellow men, or even just for the cats the firemen set the Mechanical Hound to kill?
Did he hide his non-conforming attitudes and behaviors? How? He’s not really an actor: when he does try to pretend that everything is fine, he is in a constant state of near-panic, and Captain Beatty always knows it — though Beatty doesn’t always comment on it. Beatty knows how to keep secrets.
Want to know one secret Beatty kept? He has read books. Lots of books. The clear implication is that Beatty was once a reader and lover of reading, but then was convinced to join the forces of darkness and oppression, and he does it, gladly and whole-heartedly. It’s another question which could (and should) be explored: why do rebels sometimes stop rebelling, and swing all the other way to become enforcers of the status quo?
One more influence that seems to help drive Montag to rebellion is the woman on Elm St. — my personal hero in this book — who, when the firemen show up at her house to burn her books, and threaten to burn her, beats them to the punch, setting her own house and her own self ablaze. Montag is strongly affected by it, which again shows that he may be different, that he may care more when people die horribly; but the other firemen are silent, as well, as they drive away. So they seem to be affected by this, just like Montag. So why does he resist, and the others do not?
To return to the main question, then: what drives Montag to rebel? Because he does, finally, rebel: he reads the books he stole, and then when Mildred brings her vacuous friends over to watch TV with her, he reads a poem from a book at them — Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” about the slow loss of faith in the world and the terrible emptiness that remains when all hope and goodness are lost. And maybe that poem represents why Montag fights back against his society; but also, in the poem, Arnold doesn’t fight against the loss of faith, he simply asks for true love to protect himself and his new wife from the terrible darkness and the dangers all around them. Like Faber, he accepts the loss of a good world, and tries to survive if he can. Not so Montag, who then goes on to fight more openly and aggressively: when Beatty tries to arrest Montag, knowing that he has stolen a book and read it (Montag is reported for the Dover Beach incident, though that’s not the only way Beatty knows about Montag’s defiance of their norms), Montag instead murders Beatty, assaults two other firemen, destroys the Mechanical Hound, and goes on the run. On the way out of town, he also stops and plants his own ill-gotten books in the home of another fireman, calling in the alarm himself so that the fireman will lose his home and suffer suspicion that he won’t deserve. Is that rebellion? In a way, certainly, because he’s breaking the rules and harming an enforcer of the tyrannical government; but also, that fireman is no more guilty of oppressing society than is Montag himself.
Is it rebellious if you remove yourself as an enforcer of norms and conventions? If you simply refuse to participate in making other people toe the line, are you a rebel? Doesn’t feel like enough. Imagine if George Washington had just — not collected the Stamp Tax. So if pulling himself out of the ranks of enforcers isn’t enough to make Montag really a rebel, then why would it be enough to ruin one other guy’s life? Just one more drone removed from the ranks; what is the point of that? There are always more drones.
Then again: if Clarisse was the catalyst for Montag’s rebellion, then maybe losing their home to an unfair raid by the firemen would be enough to change the views of Mr. and Mrs. Black.
In the end, it is not really clear why Montag rebels. He doesn’t plan it out, he doesn’t think about it; he just does it — and he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why while he is actually doing it, in most cases. When he steals a book from the home of the woman on Elm St., he watches his hands tuck the book inside his jacket, and he describes them as someone else’s hands, not his, nothing to do with him; clearly that isn’t true, but it shows his understanding of his actions at the time — or rather, his almost total lack of understanding. He wonders, repeatedly, why Clarisse affected him so much; he also asks where she came from, how someone like her could exist. And we don’t know. Her family is different: but why are they allowed to exist? We know why Faber exists and lives in this society that is everything he hates: he is a coward, self-professed, and cannot bear the thought of fighting; even when he joins Montag, Faber actually does nothing active or practical to fight against the government that has taken everything away from him, over the course of decades. He helps a rebel, but he isn’t one.
This is the final message of Bradbury’s book, and of his characterization of Montag as the protagonist and main rebel against this dystopian regime: Montag doesn’t have any special reason to rebel. Montag is not in any way special. He’s just a guy. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly brave, he doesn’t really have any insights; within his circumstances, the things that happen to him are not that extraordinary. But for some reason, they affect Montag just a little bit differently, just a little bit more, than they might affect another person — and so everything changes.
That’s the point. Regimes like this dystopian nightmare are doomed: because nobody can predict what would make someone rebel. The totalitarian tyranny would naturally seek to eliminate all questions, all threats, all non-conformity; and they would probably do so very effectively. But it doesn’t take much to make someone take action. Sometimes, all it takes is one friend: gaining one friend, and losing one friend. Sometimes all it takes is realizing the answer to one simple question: Are you happy? Montag realizes he is not: and that’s what makes him fight to change his world.
But Bradbury’s book, unlike the film versions that have been made based on it, is also not that hopeful: because in the end of Bradbury’s novel, the result of Montag’s rebellion is — nothing. He has no impact whatsoever. The tyrannical government collapses on itself through its own actions, not because Montag saved the day. So while the government’s attempt to prevent rebels like Montag from existing is hopeless, because the motivation, the driving force behind those rebels is mysterious and will always remain so; the rebellion of people like Montag is equally hopeless: because while the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane on the other side of the world, it can’t save human society.
Because it can’t make people want to read books.
However: that isn’t the end of this. Because Bradbury’s book is not just about people reading books, nor is it simply about a dystopian world with a totalitarian state; it is not only about Montag and his futile (though well-meaning and justified) rebellion. After Montag kills and escapes the servants of the state, he returns to Faber: who takes action and helps Montag to escape. And then Faber takes further action, leaving the city to seek out a printer he knew, so they can begin printing books once again — unquestionably rebellious, and also a more effective form of rebellion than Montag’s plan of planting book in all the firemen’s houses. Faber also tells Montag to leave the city and seek out a group of people who live on the outskirts of civilization, which Montag does: and those people, former professors and scholars and readers, and still current thinkers, show Montag (and us) the hope Bradbury sees even in his dystopian vision. It is learning. Granger, the leader of this group, describes for Montag how humanity seems to always destroy itself, and then rebuild itself out of the ashes — but the difference is that humanity learns from its mistakes. We recognize the damn stupid thing we just did, he says, and we learn not to make the same mistake. Sure, we go ahead and make a new mistake, and destroy ourselves again — but we don’t do it the same way twice. Which means, eventually, we may learn not to destroy ourselves any more.
That’s the hope. And it runs throughout this novel: because the point of this is that change, and improvement, are slow and incremental. Exactly as I described the slow degradation into tyranny and the slow rise of rebelliousness at the outset of this essay. Things don’t tend to happen quickly in our society: but they do happen. Montag doesn’t overthrow the government — but he tries. He changes. He changes because Clarisse talked to him, asked him a question, treated him as a friend; little things, but they were enough to influence Montag. Montag changed Faber, not much, but a little, just as Faber was changing Montag, giving him direction, giving him support. Granger changed Montag, and is changed by him in return: because at the very end of the book, Granger lets Montag take the lead, stepping aside for him. Just as they are walking: but for a small change, it is symbolic.
Like Montag’s rebellion. It comes in small steps, comparatively, and it has small impacts: but so does everything we do. And as this book shows, just the right small impacts in just the right places at just the right times — it can set the world on fire.
Just Dusty 