by J. Thorn
Consider this: Two students get into a dispute over a girl at a high school. The disagreement spills out into the street after school. The antagonist in our scenario pushes the other boy in the back while he is clearly looking to defuse the situation. In a desperate attempt to engage, the antagonist picks up a brick and hits the other kid over the head with it. The boy dies from the blow. Was the action “wrong”?
A group of thugs follow an eleven-year-old girl home from school. They corner her behind a set of bleachers on an empty baseball diamond and gang-rape her. Was the action “wrong”?
A high school dropout now deals drugs in a rough part of town. He attempts to sell drugs to elementary school children and has already been arrested for it twice. On one afternoon, he manages to sell crack to a ten-year-old boy who then dies from an overdose. Was the action “wrong”?
Where is the gray area in these situations? Is there ever a situation when gang-rape is not morally reprehensible? I am not suggesting that the details of the situation not be explored. However, it becomes clear that there are clearly “black and white” (this terminology has nothing to do with race, Rev. Sharpton) issues. Educators who claim that everything is a shade of gray lack conviction. They do not have the self-confidence and strength to take a stand on anything and therefore claim that one cannot stand on anything.
***
In seventh grade I had the biggest crush on Jackie Anderson. She had a cute face, great smile, perfectly feathered hair (it was 1983, so cut me some slack), and woman-sized knockers. I remember sitting on the phone for an hour, sometimes two, talking to her about nothing. I would huddle in the basement with the phone cord stretched as far into the corner as possible to prevent my brother from eavesdropping on the conversation. I fantasized about touching Jackie’s boobs, about what it would be like to squeeze them. I imagined walking to soccer practice hand in hand and having the rest of the team gawk at us. I pictured her cheering me on, her developed breasts bouncing up and down as I made saves in the goal.
Mrs. Gather fucked me over. Royally. The hideous she-beast prowled our seventh-grade classroom with a black hood and scythe. She wore bright blue eye shadow and blistering red lipstick that made her look like a painted pig. Mrs. Gather’s thin, wispy hair sat coiffed on the top of her head like rusty steel wool. She spoke with a smoker’s rasp and never, ever smiled.
As we sat in math class doing stupid shit like multiplication tables (with computers and calculators, why the fuck are we still teaching multiplication tables?), I began to daydream about Jackie. She sat across the room with the profile of an angel. I could not focus and had to place a book in my lap to conceal the excitement. Jackie would look in my direction with an awkward smile as she tried not to draw attention to the fact that I was drooling over her.
I decided against following Mrs. Gather’s instructions and turned to a clean piece of paper in my Trapper Keeper. Although I cannot remember exactly what I wrote to Jackie, it probably went something like this:
No doubt this stirred the heat in her pubescent loins. I slid the math worksheet aside and doubled over the writing to give it a more classic look. The other sheep sat in perfectly straight and saintly rows, dutifully moving through the math exercise in a flock. The small hand on the clock crept towards the twelve as it brought us closer to lunch. I decided that Jackie would get the note today, right after class.
I began to spin the events in my head the way I saw them unfolding. I would walk up to Jackie at recess right after lunch. She would be bouncing a red rubber ball, probably the same one that stung the side of my face during our last dodgeball game (the 1980s, prior to the long-term damaging effects of dodgeball and its subsequent banishment to the infernal fires of recess hell). Her friends would be whispering and giggling as I walked towards her. My Wrangler corduroys swooshed with the sound of love as I approached, my Izod polo shirt collar upturned like a bad-ass.
“Yo, Jackie,” I would say, cooler than Sly in Rocky I.
“Hey,” she would say back, without the sing-songy intonation of modern hip-hoppers.
Jackie’s friends would flutter, chirp, and look longingly on the scene as I reached out for her hand. I could see myself placing the note in her palm after I had folded it neatly into the shape of three triangles, the universal form of the love note.
“J., I have to tell you that I so want to be going with you. You are super awesome.”
“I know, baby.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I know, baby,’” I replied.
“If you call me ‘baby’ one more time, Sister Carol will take the paddle to your backside.”
Mrs. Gather towered over my desk as she glared at me through her painted face. I could see tiny beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead and at the top of her manly sideburns. Her lip quivered underneath the fine line of moustache hair that would need waxing soon.
“Stop your daydreaming and hand it to me.”
I tried to play dumb, but I had a feeling she had been standing next to me for a long time. I had no hope of hiding the note or pretending it was classwork. The rest of the kids snickered, and I remember Jackie looking down at the floor. I do not know if she wanted to avoid the carnage that was about to take place or if she had no interest in me. Probably the latter.
“My math?”
Gather’s eyes bore down at me with the vengeance of a thousand Holy Spirits. St. Bernadette herself, the patron saint of our parish and school, bellowed from the bowels of hell.
“Hand it to me, now,” she replied. The word “now” came out like a cross between a wounded Bassett hound and a Barry White chorus.
I had no retreat. I had no escape. I had to hand Gather the love note. All the kids would know as soon as they saw the official love note fold, and most would recognize the big J in “Jackie” that I had scrawled on the top of it. I was doomed.
Mrs. Gather then did something beyond human. She reached low in her rotten soul and received inspiration from Lucifer. A grin split her face and made her red lips look like the opening of a vicious wound. A wrinkly hand spotted with brown liver marks and fine white hair reached down and clamped on the love note like a set of talons. I winced. The class froze.
“I see that this is not the exercise we’ve been working on. Perhaps the rest of the class would like to see what has kept your attention away from our lesson?”
At that moment I knew what was about to happen. I hung on to the top of the desk the same way you do at the top of a roller coaster, fearing the plunge into the abyss.
Gather held the note up to her beady eyes and strutted down the row towards the front bulletin board. The teachers used the wall space near the door for permission slips and important notices as the class had to pass it multiple times every day. Nine. Nine times each day, to be exact. Her wide ass swung around the desk while her left arm reached out for a push pin sitting on top of the teacher desk. With the motion of the executioner’s blade, she slammed her fist into the cork board and stabbed the top of the note with the push pin.
“There. That should dispel any need for you to conceal your work during math class. Are there any other distractions that need brought to my attention?”
For the briefest moment, I imagined the entire class rushing her and tearing the old, bitter woman to pieces with bare hands. As quickly as it came, the feeling passed, and the second hand on the clock cracked with each movement. Every second that it moved me closer to the lunch bell felt like a death by a thousand cuts. Kids stopped paying attention to Gather, and she knew it. I swear I saw her fucking smile at me. I buried my head in my hands and waited for the inevitable. And for the record, Jesus did not come to my rescue. All the little fuckers crowded the bulletin board to read my love note to Jackie. We were both humiliated, and the incident left no hope for our burgeoning tween romance.
If Gather had the common sense and ability to deal with me like a human, things may have turned out differently. Maybe I would be waking up next t
o Jackie Anderson every day, but that would totally suck (right, honey?). Gather went zero tolerance on my ass and would have probably ended up on Dr. Phil today defending herself against child abuse allegations.
In the same manner, a consistent response to note-writing would have helped the evil bitch to deal with my transgression in a reasonable way.
Whenever I caught a runt passing notes in my classroom, I would wink and ask him (girls are so much better at it and rarely get caught) to see me after class. When the kid’s blood pressure had dropped and his face was no longer bright red, I’d ask him how it would feel if I posted the note on the bulletin board for all to read.
Following through on that threat would make me a hypocrite.
Who Wants Self-Esteem? We All Do!
I remember thinking the concept was stupid. Not a word you would find socially acceptable in casual conversation, like “retard.”
***
In the fall of 1982, I led the most glorious under-twelve soccer team in the history of western Pennsylvania. This was a time of celebration as Fame came to broadcast TV, The Who announced their farewell tour, and soccer moms became MILFs. The Midnights blew through the competition like the black night sky—at midnight. We demolished other teams and left coaches scratching the dandruff from their balding heads. I was the spiritual and physical leader of that club because I played goalie. You may have heard what a socially equalizing youth sport soccer is because it fosters a “team.” After all, there is no “I” in soccer. (No “I” in baseball, football, volleyball, lacrosse, basketball, or hockey. Fuck tennis.) In youth soccer, everyone follows the socialist model except for the goalie. Kids can be easily interchanged on the field, allowing the coach to bury the fattest, slowest kid “on the wing” where he will never touch the ball, thus preventing any mishap on the defensive side of the field. Goalie, however, requires a steadfast, brave, but mostly tall kid. A youth soccer team lives and dies by the quality of its goalie. Some coaches go with the “goalie by committee” method, as do some offensive coordinators in the NFL, but it never works. If you have a kid who can almost reach the top of the goal and is willing to let others kick a frozen rock at his head, you go with that.
I developed into a goalie because I struggled with other fundamentals of the game, such as running. Goalies get to stand inside a box for the whole game, never running more than ten or fifteen yards at a time. I was tall and gangly, the perfect combination for the position.
As fall crept towards winter, the Midnights went on a blazing tear of the under-twelve league. I cannot remember the exact matches and situations (except for the final game, which is where I am headed with this, so stick with me). We pummeled opponents and found ourselves atop the heap of the under-twelve youth league. After dispatching several opponents and angered fathers trying to play vicariously through their children, we arrived at the title match. I remember this game fondly even though I was only eleven at the time (this is a big deal for me as I have a hard time remembering if I brushed my teeth or not today). The league scheduled the game on Friday, October 30. If you have ever been to western Pennsylvania, you will know that the weather can be quite cold that time of year. And it was. The game went back and forth until we finished regulation with a tie, 1-1 (most likely 5-5 or 7-7, but 1-1 pads my goals-against average). Because this was the title game, we could not end in a tie, thereby enacting—the shootout. As goalie, you become paramount in the strategy and the focal point of the match. Teams would take turns shooting. The forward or offensive player places the ball on the spot about fifteen yards away, and the goalie must stand on the goal line until the player kicks the ball. Most coaches tell their goalies to guess because there is not enough time to react if you wait to see where the ball is heading.
My team, the mighty Midnights, went ahead by one as I did not allow a single goal in the shootout. The other team had only two shots remaining. If I stopped either one, the game would end with the Midnights as champs. The shooter who came to the ball was none other than Drew Tanser. Drew’s hair stood on end, and he routinely spat chunks of what we believed to be furry animals from his braces. Drew was that kid who would leap from a two-story roof into a baby pool before anyone would dare him. Drew was the kid who liked to kick you in the balls in the bathroom for no reason and then leave and tell the teacher you were picking on him. And he had a rocket shot from a toe of steel.
Drew approached the ball and stared into my eyes like a wolf over his kill. He took two steps and planted a solid foot into the ball. I watched the black spots turning over the white ones as the ball angled to my right and rose towards my head. At this point, I knew we had won the game. I took a step forward, knocked the ball into the ground, and sprinted towards my team on the sideline in one motion. I leapt into the arms of my teammates, and they hoisted me into the air (predating the flying chest bump by two decades).
The Midnights win! The Midnights win!
***
At our end-of-the-year banquet, we gathered around the table in the fire hall, pulled at the plastic tablecloth, and used Ritchie Greschek for a soccer ball. That’s what you get for being short.
The coaches tried to give a victory speech, but nobody was paying attention. We wanted the trophy, that decadent, goldish-looking guy perched atop faux marble, declaring us champs. We got that, but we got something else as well. We each received our own “Midnights” trophy.
I remember thinking the concept was stupid.
While it might not be significant to you, this cheap, plastic trophy was my first exposure to that all-important piece of childhood, Self-Esteem (unless you are Drew Tanser, in which case, too fucking bad for you). It must be capitalized. The term is so ingrained within our culture as well as our educational institutions that it’s now accepted as a force of nature, like gravity or the biker-chick hotness of Angelina Jolie (circa Tomb Raider, not circa African adoptions).
***
The Self-Esteem movement in American began with the assumption that every child carries a finely-tuned, sensitive, and delicate device known as Self-Esteem. One must be careful and cradle the child like in those ninth-grade home economics classes where the teacher forces you to carry an egg around like a baby until it cracks to prove how crackable eggs are. Anything can lower Self-Esteem, such as an unkind word, failure, losing, or getting punched in the face. All of these occurrences work to erode Self-Esteem, thereby creating a culture of whiny, depressed, self-loathing adults who will seek to rectify a destroyed childhood with legal drugs and antidepressants. In Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman argues that low Self-Esteem is “a totally meaningless designation, simply because there’s no extension of human behavior that doesn’t qualify. If you have no self-confidence, it’s assumed your arrogance is an attempt to overcompensate for a lack of self-esteem. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with the ‘correct’ level of self-esteem.”
This is the reality that nobody wants to admit today but is not where things stood in 1982. Many professional educators still work under this assumption. They believe that a child’s Self-Esteem is completely vulnerable to external forces that work to chip away at it. They believe that by making every child “feel good” they will bolster Self-Esteem. This manifests itself in things like a “Person of the Week” bulletin board, the banning of picking teams at recess, the banning of dodgeball, and more.
The “Person of the Week” is an insidious concept where each child gets a moment to shine to the rest of the community. While I will acknowledge that this type of bulletin board can work with younger children, it rarely has the desired effect beyond third grade. As children mature, they look to hold on to common bonds. Through middle school, they strive to be part of the group, one of the gang. They do not wish to be singled out on a “Person of the Week” bulletin board. By the time children enter high school, things change yet again when they become “private rebels,” wishing no acknowledgement from authority figures and only implicit recognition from peers that mimic dress, behavi
or, and slang. For typical kids, a “Person of the Week” makes them feel special, like everyone else. George Carlin proposed an interesting scenario during his final taped performance on HBO. During a rant on the Self-Esteem movement, he asked a pointed question.
“What about every adult? Isn’t every adult special, too? And if not, then at what age do you go from being special to being NOT so special? And if every adult is special, then that means we’re all special, and the whole idea loses all its fucking meaning.”
Like Dash from The Incredibles says when Helen claims that everyone is special, “ . . . It’s another way of saying no one is.”
***
“ . . . The child will never lose. We know he’ll never lose, because in today’s America, no child ever loses! There are no losers anymore. Everyone’s a winner, no matter what the game, or sport, or competition. Everybody wins. . . . Everybody gets a trophy. . . . ”
Love or hate Carlin, the man had his finger on the pulse of American culture. He realized that kids are very perceptive and that they see through the nonsense. I know this because they saw through my façade of competency when I arrived to school with a hangover. They may have not known I had finished pounding Buds three hours earlier, but they knew it would be a great day to see how many times they could say my name in one forty-five-minute block of time.
They know that not every child can win and that in any competition or sporting event, someone will ultimately lose. It is not an evil ploy to tear at Self-Esteem; it is the way things are. It does not matter whether you call it “losing” or the “second winner,” kids know the difference in the same way that Southerners say things like, “Ya know, Mabel bought one raffle ticket at the church fair and I spent my entire paycheck on them, and she won, bless her heart.” What they really mean is, “Ya know, Mabel bought one raffle ticket at the church fair and I spent my entire paycheck on them, and she won, the fucking bitch.” Call it what you want, kids know.
