The Man Behind the Curtain

       Settle in and get comfortable, gang. This is gonna be a long one.

Last week a seventh grade girl in my homeroom class gave me a brand new paperback book, without explanation. She had stuck a Post It note on the front cover with my name written in pen and said, “This is for you.”

This wasn’t the first time a student had given me a book as a gift. I’ve received many books from students over the years. It’s never been a secret that I love books, both reading them and writing them, and I have always been grateful and flattered that a child thought enough of me to favor me with such a token of affection and respect. But this one was different.

First, there was no special occasion. It wasn’t a holiday. It wasn’t my birthday; it wasn’t Teacher Appreciation Week; and I hadn’t done any noteworthy deed or kindness for this young lady. She’s just one of twenty-something kids I monitor for about half an hour every afternoon.

Second, it came out of the blue. I was blindsided. There were no previous conversations that might have led her to buy me this book, no discussions that might have caused me to go, “Ah, yes, of course. I should have known this would follow.” In short, there was no reason for this little surprise.

Third? The topic. I love character driven fiction. I like to read biographies and history. I even read the occasional science fiction novel, and I’m fascinated by nonfiction studies of death and the afterlife. But this one was none of those. The title of this one proclaimed that God doesn’t believe in atheists.”

Now, my young charge didn’t have to tell me why she’d bought me the book; I already had a pretty good idea. But I asked anyway.

“The eighth graders say you’re an atheist,” she replied.

“Do they,” I replied, one eyebrow cocked.

“Yes.”

“And just how do they know that?” I asked.

By now, a cluster of other girls and a couple of boys had gathered to listen to this burgeoning theological discussion. When they saw an opening, they jumped in. 

“Everybody says so,” she answered.

I admit that irritated me a little, though her response didn’t surprise me. For the past twelve years adults and students in the building where I work have made assumptions about me based upon, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing but their own prejudices. But hey, I work in the belly of the beast. It’s not as though I didn’t expect to be an outcast when I got here. I just didn’t expect the vitriol to run so long and so deep, to be passed on from one sibling to another, from one colleague to another. Mind you, this seventh grader was just out of the womb when I started teaching at this school, and until late August of this year, I did not know she existed, and she probably didn’t know I existed, either. Yet, she presumed to know enough about me to determine that my soul was in danger of burning forever in hell because, again, she assumed I not only didn’t share her beliefs, but by making that assumption extrapolated that I was an atheist to boot.

I won’t belabor the finer points of the thoroughly engrossing non-conversation that followed (try as they might to engage me in debate, I reminded the kids of two things: 1) that they had wandered into the swamps of my personal business; they were in danger and had no need and no right to be there, and 2) that I was not about to become embroiled in a religious exchange during school hours. “If you want to come back at 3:41,” I told them, “we can talk religion all you want. But not now.”

That, of course, didn’t satisfy them one whit. They were determined to convince me right then and there that I was an atheistic heathen bound for hellfire, though “we don’t want to see anyone go to hell.” For that stated reason alone, they felt compelled to persuade me of the urgency that I accept their doctrine. In truth, however, the odor I smelled coming from their “argument” was very familiar. It had the easily distinguished and characteristically foul odor of medieval Holier-Than-Thou. I’ve smelled it hundreds, if not thousands, of times before, sometimes from naive but well-meaning evangelicals, but all too often from smug converts who are so unstable in their own convictions that the only way they can sleep at night is if they go out and “win souls for Christ” (as if they were scouring the fairgrounds for rigged games to play and tarnished trophies to collect, as if anyone’s soul but their own was theirs to win in the first place). Easy, I thought, and to be expected of born again Christians: to sit on their thrones of forgiveness and pronounce those who don’t adhere to their dogma as being lesser creatures in need of salvation, as if they were stray untamed dogs in dire need of proper training.

Well.

I told my young benefactor that I would read the book . . . and I just might someday. But not today. Not tomorrow. And while I didn’t exactly say that I forgave her and her tight, compact band of “besties" for proselytizing to a grown adult, who has been studying and searching spiritual subjects all his life, on matters about which they know absolutely nothing, other than what they’ve had ironed into their stiff, diminutive collars by their parents and preachers and friends, Forgive them, Lord, for they have no idea what they’re talking about. They are, after all, only twelve or thirteen years old. I have wine in my pantry that’s older than they are.

No, what I couldn’t and can’t forgive, is the presumptive society in which we live. More directly, the loose lipped, judgmental nature of that society. For years now, people- especially students -have been asking me the same four questions, over and over and over, ad nauseam. Why, I do not know. The four questions are these:

1. Were you a hippie?
2. Did you ever smoke pot?
3. Are you a Christian?
4. What was the most important thing you learned in college?

And for years I have been answering those questions, in reverse order, the same way:

4.  I learned not to be too proud or embarrassed to ask questions, even what seem at first to be dumb questions.

3.  None of your business. Why don’t you ask me something personal?

2.  See #3

1.  Define “hippie.”

So, tonight I have four questions for all those who keep asking me any or all of these four questions:

1. No matter what my answer may be to any of your questions, would it change the caliber of my intelligence or who I am? The kind of person I am?
2. Would my answers make me any less or more moral?
3. Would it affect how well I teach?
4. Is it possible for you to keep your prejudices and biases in check long enough to, as Rodney King so famously put it, “just get along?”

From the day I walked into that school building twelve years ago, I was not welcomed by the majority of the staff. Who knows why? Maybe I exude something, a rebellious, anti-military-industrial complex pheromone or something. Most of those who would not say good morning to me in the halls when I greeted them are gone now, fortunately, ferried off to other destinations and other careers. But of the ones who remain, I am still social and intellectual anathema to some of them. Funny thing, too: the notions that have been passed on about me from one student to the other over the years have evidently also been passed on from one teacher to the other.

However, after wondering for so long why I have been pigeonholed as some kind of Socialist/Communist/atheist wild-eyed intellectual snob bohemian Woodstock refugee, I think I know now why this is. It’s my own fault.

You see, when I was a kid in the 1960s, I took the mantras of Gandhi and Buddha, the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and the voices of the counter culture such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan seriously. I believed in their causes, and I believed in truth and social change. I still do. These were my heroes. They inspired young people like me to question everything, to not accept the rulings of authority, whether parents, teachers or government, at face value. And as history over the last forty-something years has shown us, it was a damn good thing somebody was watching the henhouse and crying “Wolf!” when it needed to be cried. We have learned that our politicians lie and deceive at every turn, that our bankers and investors steal from us with impunity, and that priests and teachers are not always above a little moral turpitude now and then. My generation has grown up quite a bit over the past four decades; we are not nearly so naive as our parents were. Whistle blowers? I love ‘em!

As a young teenager, I began to question authority. I grew my hair long and  challenged my teachers to teach me something, to give me information I could use, not just hack up academic fur balls on a test for a grade that had no bearing on me as a person, or the life I was hoping to live. I especially took on hypocrites, the adults and classmates who said I looked “like a girl;” who labeled me a troublemaker or class clown because I dared to speak out when I felt my voice needed to be heard; when I was obviously and legitimately being singled out; when I, or someone else, was being treated unjustly. 

The teachers and some of my classmates didn’t like that, of course. But because they could never, or would never, give me straight answers, I now make sure that I tell my students why they’re learning what they’re learning in school. I don’t limit it to just my subject, either. They ask me why they have to learn history and math and biology, and I try to give them responses they can use. They tell me they used to enjoy reading and writing, but now they hate it, and I tell them don’t give up! You won’t always be annotating boring classic novels and writing essays on irrelevant and uninteresting assigned topics. Someday soon you’ll have the freedom to read whatever you want to read and to enjoy it for its own sake. You’ll be able to write whatever your imagination dictates, no matter how bizarre or irreverent. But I’m the only teacher I know who does this, and word gets around. Other teachers don’t like me tramping through their gardens. They think I’m trying to show them up if I discuss their subjects in my class. Excuse me, but I thought we were supposed to integrate subjects . . . you know, go cross curricular and all that.

As a teenager I questioned my parents. I respected them, of course, loved them too. But as any parent knows, there are times when kids tread all over your new white carpet with their attitudes and behavior and struggles for self-identity and independence. Then, when mom and dad’s patience breakers short circuit and they resort to one of the tried and true tactical responses guaranteed to start a fight— “Because I said so!” or “That’s just the way it is,” or “Someday you’ll understand,” and the ever-popular “Nobody ever said life was fair” — they wonder why their teenager wigs out. Jesus, my aching head! Why couldn’t my parents just be straight with me? Why couldn’t they just say,

“You have to go to school because it’s the law. Because you have to have something besides rocks and potatoes in that empty jar of yours to make it in this life. Your mother and I aren’t going to carry your freight until we’re dead, you know. Because your mother would go absolutely bat shit if you and your brother were home twelve months out of the year, that’s why.”

Those were answers I could have lived with, answers I could have accepted. They may not have been what I wanted to hear— what kid wants to hear the gravy train is going to pull out of the station at the end of high school and leave him standing alone on the platform? What kid wants to hear he isn’t going to make millions in the NBA or start his career as a CEO? That he’s going to drive a Honda, not a full sized Mercedes? It’s what I tell my own kids, and by all accounts they are turning out great. It’s also the truth, so I tell my students the same thing. Of course, kids don’t always want to hear the truth, and parents and colleagues sometimes resent it when I stick pins in the fantasy balloons they have handed this up and coming generation of incomplete thinkers. Better a small pop! now than a ruinous explosion later.

With all my adolescent questioning came, occasionally, answers. And reality. I found reality and truth to my liking, though the price I paid to learn them was the discovery that I was living in a false and damaged world. A world built upon deception, lies, half-truths, myths, power, money, image, and an unreasonable need to be accepted by our peers at any cost. A world where my father was told by the company he’d been loyal to for years— and who told him, and he believed —that he would be taken care of with a pension for life once he retired at 65. Throughout my teen years I insisted he was being fed a line, that the company he had placed all his faith in was out to screw him, and he insisted I didn’t know what I was talking about. However, when he turned 55, my dad learned the dark, unholy truth: the company forced him out, a full ten years earlier than they said they would and that he expected. Gave him a severance package that held him and my mother together for about two years while he scrambled to find work— any work —just so he could pay the mortgage. Retirement? There was no retirement. He survived until the day he died.

Even at the risk of compromising our intelligence, our morals, our instincts, and, yes, maybe even our souls, we go along with whatever we’re told, and we “work and play well with others.” But when you refuse to play the game, you’re labeled as a loose canon, a rebel. Go “all mavericky” and you’re not positioning yourself for the spotlight on the national stage, you’re setting yourself up for isolation, ostricization, and ejection. 

So, why exactly do my questioners care whether I was a hippie or not? Because hippies are so 1960s, and they are so today? Because it makes them feel superior to me somehow? Cooler? Hate to tell you, kids, but that’s why you learn history. What’s cool today will suck tomorrow.

Tell me again why it’s important for you to know whether I smoked grass or not? Oh, that’s right. Because it would help explain my odd sense of humor, my out-of-the-box ideas and behavior. All the things I do and say that give you license to declare that I’m “weird.” Couldn’t have anything to do with the cartoons and comics I grew up watching, could it? The personality and genes I was born with? Nope, he must have wandered off the set of a Cheech and Chong movie. 

Funny thing: hasn’t “think outside the box” been the call to arms in schools and corporations for a long time now? Yes, I believe it has. Only trouble is, if you actually do think outside the box, those who keep telling you to think outside the box will slap you right back into it. “It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave,” say The Moody Blues.

Sorry, boys and girls, but you ain’t never gettin’ the answer to this one. Besides, if I tell you I smoked dope or dropped acid or smeared Vapo Rub into my belly button, you’ll point your finger at me and say, “Ha! I thought so!” You’ll lose what little respect you may have had for me in the first place, even though half the adults in your own family who are over 50 probably visited the Reefer Man themselves “back in the day.” Of course, they’ll never admit it. And if I proclaim my innocence and say I never smoked pot or chewed peyote, or snorted baking powder, you won’t believe me anyhow. I’m too “weird.” No one can be that odd just because he’s got a keen sense of humor and likes to look at things from unusual angles. And certainly, no one who’s that high on life can actually feel that way without getting, you know, high. Remember, folks: life sucks and then you die. You need to act like it.

And as for whether or not I’m a Christian?

Ah, yes. 

First, let me just say that it’s nobody’s business but my own. Who and what I believe in is for me to know and you to never find out. Last I checked, this country was founded on a number of sacred principles, one of which was that any person could worship any god in any way he or she saw fit, without fear of ridicule or reprisal. Without having someone hand him a book titled God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists because she presumes to know the mind, heart, and character of the individual to whom she is giving the book. Because other equally misinformed individuals have made judgments on the recipient of the book based upon  . . . based upon what, exactly? The length of his hair? The clothes he wears? The books he reads? The motorcycle he rides? The music he listens to? Do you judge your neighbor’s dog based upon its coat? Its eating habits? Its size and markings? Its bark? Its ability and willingness to scare the bejesus out of anybody who dares set foot on its territory?

Here’s why you want to know if I believe in the same god you do— or whether I believe in (G)od at all —and whether I vote Republican or Democrat, or whatever demographic tidbit lights your curiosity fuse: you want to know because if I believe or think or vote the way you do, it validates your position. It makes you feel more secure knowing you’ve found one more person— and an educated person at that —who is on the same team you are. But if I don’t believe or think or vote as you do, why then, you can hold your head up high, smug and certain in the knowledge that your way is the right way, and that I’m just an ignorant mongrel who wandered across your path out of some dark and dirty alleyway by mistake. Someone you can talk about and scoff at and spread rumors about once I’m out of earshot.

Well, anyway, as I say, I told my little seventh grade evangelist wannabe that I would read the book she gave me, and I meant it. I will. But not anytime soon, and not for the reasons she and whoever gave her the money to buy it in the first place think. I’m going to read it because, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, you must know your enemy. I’m a Taurus, and Tauruses are known for being intelligent, practical, artistic, generous, and above all, true and loyal friends.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I was tempted to give my little gift giver an abbreviated lecture about why she shouldn’t take such huge judgmental leaps when she has no facts whatsoever to support her assertions, but I didn’t. She’s a child, I reminded myself, just a child. A malleable, misinformed, easily manipulated, inexperienced, highly impressionable child being led down a primrose path by the only people in her very young life she believes she can trust. No, I told myself, not now. Not me. Let life and others reveal “that man behind the curtain.”