What doesn't kill you

A flow chart chronicling good times …

For the record, I didn't go to junior high with Kelly Mills. But really I did.

Because you did too. You went to junior high with me and I with you. We all went to the same junior high, the same special hell, the same goddamned gaping ulcerated hole that marks the major flaw in the U.S. public education system.

Why, in the name of holiness, would adults remove kids from elementary school and put them on a separate campus for two years, there to stew in their own pubescent juices, their id hanging out for all to see,  barely living hair triggers of rage and uncertainty and painful bone growth and sex and cruelty?

And I count myself one of the lucky survivors. I remember some wonderful people who just came apart during that time. Not that junior high caused it, but junior high didn't help.

(Turns out someone took credit for the junior high system. His name was William Alexander, an educator who thought middle graders' needs were being neglected, so the "father of American middle school" ushered in the separate campuses. Penal colonies, more like.)

Kelly Mills last week captured life in junior high perfectly in the San Francisco Chronicle blog "The Poop." I love the photo published with it, a still from the British movie version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, itself the ideal metaphor for every poorly supervised school recess everywhere in America.

Mills wrote the blog because she was sending her daughter off to middle school (the penal colonies' accepted name now); though Mills thought her sociable kid would adjust, she couldn't help but tumble backward in memory of her own junior high days.

Hers was a time of vicious and mercurial cliques, best friends who inexplicably and instantaneously ostracized her, and merciless mocking. A fitness trainer, Mills said all but one of her staff (and that one went to school overseas) harbored the same bitter memories; men remembered being bullied and beat up. All recalled body issues that were only magnified by ridiculous PE uniforms.

Though her daughter reports students are more tolerant and less openly homophobic than in my generation, the mockery via social media is more insidious: an especially heartless kind of target marketing.

I remember tense bus rides similar to this toon, in which bullies pestered and poked and hit until they got me to react, then turned the tables as if I had threatened them, which escalated usually into hollow threats to beat me down once I got off the bus. The bus drivers usually did nothing except drive the bus. Like Mills said, I felt largely on my own.

My PE teacher made me clean up my vomit after my first mile run, and for most of the seventh grade and half of the eighth, I tried to will myself sick on the days we ran, and couldn't eat scrambled eggs again for another 10 years. I made my parents heartsick begging them to let me stay home.

(He was the same teacher who ridiculed me for pointing out his accounting error that incorrectly gave me a presidential fitness award.) 

By eighth grade I slimmed down and had enough strength to run and eventually run fast — fast enough to delude myself into believing I could make the 1976 Olympic team. Proof alone we were unstable individuals who should not have been shunned.

I undermine the good stuff: Mrs. Coffin's drama class, especially the improv sessions … Mrs. Burch's choir class, even though her style of inspiration was to scream louder (now I wish I had taken drama and choir in high school) … Mr. Lynch's leadership history where we studied the legislative process and even took a week trip to San Francisco and Sacramento to present bills we had written (though it came at the cost of the U.S. history we would have been studying at the time) … Mr. Beebe's hiking club. So many other teachers and adults I'm leaving out; most of them had guts and heart.

Mills found similar to like, but I agree with her on this point:

You still couldn’t pay me enough to go back and repeat that time in my life.

In fact, when I was a substitute teacher I strenuously avoided middle schools. Nothing has changed. Much is worse.

On one assignment, another substitute teacher volunteered to guide me to my classroom. He spent the entire walk explaining what animals these kids were (he had subbed in the same class before) and how I need to establish my dominance right away if I wanted to survive the day.

Along our walk, I could hear teachers screaming — yes, screaming! — at students. Out of the open doors I could hear teachers cutting down individual students for the amusement, terror and relief of others unpicked on.

The school was named after a state lawmaker. I think maybe he died from the heartache of knowing his name graces a glorified juvenile detention facility in his beloved city.

My class turned about to be a dozen students who didn't speak English very well. Not an animal in the bunch. One spoke Vietnamese, the rest Spanish. In what little Spanish I know, I told the majority I don't speak Spanish very well but I'm here to help. Help me, please, I said. We spent the day working together, no trouble, no screaming, no frustration … and I learned some more Spanish.

Vice principals would walk into my classroom at this school, talking through megaphones, with some odd idea they were calming the students for me at 80 decibels.

On another time, same school, attempting to teach math where students had only enough textbooks for every three to share (and they couldn't take the books home), one kid sat in the middle of the rows, a man-child king, letting his court attend to him. He ruled; I was a seventh grader again, a big pimply scared knot of intestines.

I had to work around this kid, picking off his court one by one to attend instead to their work.

Something about the man-child seemed familiar, and I placed him later in the day when he returned to retrieve something. He was a little fireplug of a four-year-old nine years before, when I was coaching Junior Giants baseball in our neighborhood and his mom begged me to sign up her son even though he wasn't old enough. We let him play; he was overjoyed.

When I reminded the man-child, a big goofy smile took over his dull menacing face. "Oh, yeah! How you doing, Coach Turner?"

He might be a high school senior now, might have mellowed a bit, might have stopped being a big jerk. High school was a better time for me (though not for many), a time for settling down and caring less about what others thought of you.

A time for going your own way.

Yeah, you couldn't pay me to go back.

(It just occurred to me that maybe that was old Bill Alexander's intent. He wanted us to face all that social and biological anarchy away from society so we'd learn the hardest way how to toughen up and mellow out. It's the most pervasive kind of conspiracy involving teachers and administrators and parents, to give us something to have to live through. Good ol' teachers and administrators and parents …)

On 9/11

Mood level: Smoldering bright orange
for a while now …

No superlatives can ever contain the horror and shock and sadness and disbelief of Sept. 11, 2001 — though we all will try in many and varied ways as the tenth anniversary approaches this weekend.

In the news media, the effort has already begun in earnest. News anchors introduce the myriad angles on the anniversary, their chins pointed slightly lower to their chests, their eyebrows arranged just so, conveying a calculated look of somber observation.

But we never truly grieved that impossible horror, never got a chance, even though the innumerable tributes under way say that we did. The Bush administration, helped by the mainstream media's lack of backbone, co-opted that day as a symbol to make us afraid of one another.

Our leaders used it to incite two protracted, misguided and ruinous wars we still wage against dubious enemies, begun on the basis of outright lies. Instead of having nothing to fear but fear itself, we have accepted the offer of fear by itself, which at first did frighten us but now has dulled and callused us, enabling the puppet masters of big oil, banking and military industry to profit mightily in our torpor.

Mission accomplished.

All the while, we still send women and men into the teeth of these wars — and will still, for years — yet barely receive them when they return damaged or dead, and the nation has fragmented.

The redemption and healing that should have followed those terrible events have been tainted by what followed instead. I can't consume any of the 9/11 remembrances and never-before-heard audiotapes, can't stop for a moment to regard that day for its own sake, without immediately linking it to the bloody horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are WTF? funhouse-mirror countermeasures in search of phantom WMDs. It's impossible to mourn because it's impossible not to be angry — at this absurd sequence of events, at myself for succumbing to indifference and impotence.

Those people who fell from the World Trade Center towers to their doom — such nightmarish visions! — might as well have disappeared into the desert sands around Fallujah, for all that we got to consider their horror and loss, to themselves, their families, their employers, their communities. They became fodder for what I still believe is George W. Bush's intent to salvage the legacy of his father.

Since 9/11/2001, we have become Lord of the Flies, reduced to our baser selves. Psychiatrist Justin Frank of Washington, D.C. holds a similar view, that we have become babies, viewing the world in black and white and Us versus Them.

Opposition to our nation's response — to war, to torture, to degradation, to community-endorsed hatred of Muslims, even to this strange semantic casting of ourselves as The Homeland — means being unpatriotic.

And patriots, as we know through the doublespeaky Patriot Act, willingly give up many of our freedoms in exchange for what we want to think is our comfort and safety. Air traveler with a Middle Eastern kinda name? Sure, haul him away without benefit of a doubt, just so long as I can stop feeling the fear you keep waving in front of me.

You can trace all of this to obvious outcomes, such as a divided, uncompromising Congress, and to the accepted notion now that compromise is bad (when in fact compromise is the nature of action in a representative government).

You can trace it to our economic crisis, to jobs lost at a bewildering rate, to the banks that took our money to stay in business despite being criminally bad at it, to us no longer having the money to teach our children well or keep our bridges up and pay people to do all of that.

Hand in glove, you can trace it to the artless propaganda that divides us. I'm not so naive as to believe propaganda hasn't always bedeviled us, but it used to be sophisticated. Now it's an open wound. Even before an idea rises into public view, haters of that idea create words to kill it and replace it with new ideas that make us afraid.

Propagandists repeat that simple anti-idea ad infinitum until the idea wilts in its dense shadow. So we have "Obamacare," "death panels," and the anti-ideas that President Obama is a "socialist" with designs to ruin this country, that he is Muslim (with the presumption that this is a bad thing), that he is not a citizen, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and on and on. Just shouted and bellowed over and over again, without regard to merit, until the shouts and bellows become the new normal.

Tell lies often enough, and they become the truth. 

If not for the path down the rabbit hole that we took after 9/11, we wouldn't have the Tea Party, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox News. Hey, you say, those are all right-leaning people and entities! Don't you like right-wingers? Love 'em, actually. We should be a people of diverse ideas working toward the pursuit of happiness. I hate that they exist solely because of the artless propaganda that the fallout from 9/11 made fashionable.

It has begotten the abysmal meanness in which our governments still deny and delay needed medical care to those who suffered from environmental toxins as they rescued the people from the World Trade Center collapse.

I trace it farther, to reality TV shows where we get to watch people re-enact Lord of the Flies in all manner of novel ways — on supposedly deserted islands, fashion runways, celebrity kitchens, New Jersey, wherever the Kardashians are.

I trace it even to last week's Fox Sports' idea of a funny bit in which a reporter interviewed only Asian students — preferably students still learning English — from USC (because that's the entire student body, right?) to have them give a "good old-fashioned, all-American" welcome to two universities that had joined the expanded Pac 12 football conference. They talk funny, get it? Some of them don't even know what the Pac 12 is — hilarious, right? Because all of us normal people do, or should. It's football, and that's American, see? Those people are different from Us, so we get to mock them.

Fox canceled that show, saying it resulted from a "breakdown in our internal processes," which I suspect is doublespeak for, "We couldn't possibly have envisioned, in the current cultural climate, this could be offensive." As is the custom in public apologies these days, Fox apologized only to those who found offense, rather than for its base cruelty.

I'm looking for signs — glimmers — that we still may truly heal from 9/11/2001. Maybe this show's cancellation is one glimmer, that time will come when all divisions cease, and our tragedy against ourselves and the world dim in memory.

When?