“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
— Frederick Douglass
We toured the local high school yesterday. One of our kids will be heading there in the fall and so we asked to have a little walk-thru. If they could check out the vibe and see the classrooms and all that, we figured, then maybe the build-up might be less scary or intense. Heading to high school, especially one in a new school district, is terrifying. And with good reason too. Everything you have learned (and more importantly: haven’t learned) up until now is about to spit you out into the proverbial jaws of the most savage beast known to man.
For the halls of any American high school are places of reckoning, pure and simple. Stumble and it will swallow you whole. Fuck up and it will spit you out into the nether system. Shine and you will believe that you have arrived….only to discover, soon enough, that it was all a smoke show. And that life never gave a rat’s ass about your popularity or your grades or anything like that. Because in the end, you’re going to get bitch-slapped by the ways of the world.
Enjoy!
To be fair, the difference between me at 53 years old and my teenagers (or any local kids in general) is basically apocalyptic. I mean, rarely in the annals of history have two or three generations existing side-by-side found themselves so meaningfully separated by such powerful events. I graduated high school so long ago…before the internet/ before cell phones/ before identity politics had exploded in all of our faces. This, in and of itself, causes me to exist on an entirely different plane than the ones my kids and step kids live upon. The gulf between someone like me, who grew up like I did (before the tech revolution of the last 25 years) and kids growing up in the United States right now is wider than any gap between kids and their living elders than ever before.
With maaaaybe the exception of the kids who were born starting like a week or two after fire was first discovered by our most rough and tumble ancestors.
In other words, people born into this world now are living vastly different lives than the ones me and you have known (I’m guessing you’re probably ‘oldish’ like me). I know that goes without saying but it’s wildly important to keep reminding ourselves of this as we begin to wake up and look around ourselves at a nation that appears to be either CRUMBLING or RISING right before our eyes, depending on the person. Or more specifically: depending on the politics of the person.
This is identity politics at work.
It has always been around/ people have always gravitated towards others of their ilk or kind or whatever. But now the stakes have been raised, a million-fold it would seem, by the presence of this sky fall of radically one-sided information sources. Each of us has been able to customize our social media feeds, choose our biased news sources and cull our TV channels into an almost nuclear version of stream-lined single paradigm vision, the likes of which have never-before been known to man.
And lucky you. And lucky me. We are the guinea pigs. We are the last of the old world thrust into the new. Jesus fucking Christ, I mean, no wonder we’re out here steering the whole runaway ship right into the vicious maelstrom. How could we not be? We have no goddamn idea what we’re doing! We have no experience with this kind of thing! We were raised on two or three rather unbiased news sources and now we have had a thousand of them rammed down our throat.
I cry for mercy, you cry for justice. Your neighbor cries for the tightening of the screws…for the reckoning to begin. Whatever that means.
We didn’t see any of this coming. No one did. Or did they? I don’t know. I have no clue. I am not an intellectual. I’m not accomplished or successful in the eyes of most. By American standards, I’ve managed to remain a grub worm/ a cog in the system. Even as far back as high school, girls saw next to nothing in me. I smoked so much weed back then because I liked the feeling of being warm of heart and light in the mind. I took LSD in the mountains with my friends and I saw raccoons at the top up a hundred hemlocks at once. I inhaled camera lense cleaner in the back halls of the local mall and paralyzed myself into blackouts that likely ripped apart brain cells I wish I had now. I could probably use them. As a young person I ate sausage grinders from the pizza shops and hoagies from the corner delis and I rooted for the Phillies and the Eagles and I played Little League and then Babe Ruth and I listened to the Boss and the Stones and it all made sense to me then but what does it mean now, you know? Back then I read old novels in my bed and the cool of my sheets versus the humid August nights intoxicated my skin and made me feel shower fresh and alive and possible. I smoked Parliaments and Merits left behind by rich people, smokes I found in the golf carts I cleaned for money at the country club. When I turned 18 I voted for Democrats because I was naive, I guess.. I thought the most important thing to care about was people being equal. I figured that working class people like me and black people like the people around me and white people like the people I knew and rock/roll people like many I loved, I figured that all of us stood on common ground. I was sure that voting for financial concerns was greedy and, quite frankly, fucking boring.
To this day, I suppose that was foolish on my part. To think I was in cahoots with so many when none of them had even ever heard of my chubby fat loser ass. I was a microwave mozzarella stick eatin’ smallmouth bass fishin’ cheap electric guitar wearin’ motherfucker lost in teenage lust and battling zits the size of shiny dimes on the side of my nose. Everything was very very fucked up right from the get-go. How did I not see that??!! Ugh!
It’s because I thought I was fine. I thought I was just talking to myself the same as everyone did. I believed that common decency bred common decency. I was sure that staring at glittering gold would run you bind. Turns out I was chasing all the wrong ideas, I guess. It turns out I was an impressionable nervous maniac looking down on my town in the night. Floating in silence, like a blimp in the night, out over the tomato pie bakery, out over the Win-Wah Chinese joint, I was bapping off the night clouds. I was convinced I was on the right track and that the nation was united in our mutual love of cheesesteaks and our collective appreciation for the works of Steve Earle and The Temptations. On baking summer afternoons, driving home from my job sweeping sidewalks at the King of Prussia Plaza, I would listen to my Bruce cassettes and smoke my cigs and I felt some kind of strange beautiful familiarity with people that I passed. Construction dudes sweating harshly in gravel dust. Ladies in flowing dresses walking to their cars in the business park lots. Kids chasing each other through a sprinkler on some green grass lawn. There was poetry and union in what I just wandered right through.
Everywhere you look, I told myself, there’s people finding soul.
Where did they all go?
What happened?
How did I get everything so goddamn fucking wrong?
What am I even trying to say here? I don’t know. I’m sorry. I thought I had a point but I guess I really don’t. I’m just. So. Beside myself. Scared. Confused.
Tired. Tired. Tired.
Everyone is pissing me off.
Just STFU.
All y’all.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
