“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
I’ve run through a long list of words searching for one that best describes my first year of teaching, discarding some as too dramatic, others as too mild, a few as wildly inappropriate. It was a confounding year. Look at the definition: “causing surprise and confusion; mixing up (something) with something else so that the individual elements become difficult to distinguish.” Make it a dream. You’ve been assigned to […]
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I do not know who taught me to work hard. Neither of my parents, who all in all were pretty laissez faire about child rearing by the time they got to me. Maybe I just looked at them in perpetual motion and took the hint — there is only one speed, forward, go. Or maybe like my brother and sisters, we carried the DNA of Depression experiences inside us, received […]
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In my junior and senior years of high school, I was knocked down and then altered by the murders of King and Kennedy, by a sinister and fear-mongering Nixon, by the televised violence of the Chicago convention, and by Vietnam, by its daily, useless devastation. I read Ramparts, Fanon and Cleaver , Hunter S. Thompson , Marcuse , histories of the War . I marched in demonstrations and engaged in long arguments. Somehow, in circumstances I no longer remember, […]
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In eighth grade I wrote a book. During some recesses I sat on the side of the yard and watched the boys run, one bold son occasionally breaking free to scamper up to a knot of girls and shout and cause them to giggle. I watched the girls jump rope and huddle in groups and look at the boys. I watched the nuns in their shawls looking at us, tall […]
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