Essay by Martha Quillen
Education – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
AFTER READING A SUNDAY supplement feature about depression last week, I realized that I’m not particularly prone to depression. The article talked about people who felt hopeless, suicidal, tired, and defeated, and who thought that there was nothing they could do to change anything.
I, on the other hand, tend to think that perfectly ordinary people can change their lives, their communities, and even the world. In fact, I’m totally convinced that average citizens are changing the world — right now, for better or worse, whether they mean to or not.
And therefore, I tend to write about how important it is to attend meetings, study issues, write letters to candidates and/or local newspapers, read about politics, the law, and the economy — and vote.
Despite the prevalence of apathy and cynicism, there’s a wealth of evidence that participation does work. The elderly, soccer moms, and white collar workers tend to get involved in politics and vote regularly — and they are far better represented than less active groups.
So, yes, I think perfectly ordinary Americans can change their government.
But I can’t help but notice that the U.S. seems to be going in unpopular directions regardless. In fact, I’m not sure anyone is thrilled with our government, our economy, our courts, our schools, our health care system, or our leaders. And plenty of citizens seem to feel pushed around. Anger, bitterness, alienation, and suspicion abound in public forums.
Of course, modern political discourse tends to encompass issues like family values, gay marriage, abortion, and school prayer. And with sex, religion, marriage and divorce at the forefront, politics are considerably more personal than they were when I was taking high school civics in 1965. Kids, however, may not have changed so much.
Until I was in eleventh grade, I went to high school in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. Students there came from around the world, yet were a model of conformity. Although I occasionally went to the movies and shared rides with girls whose fathers were envoys from Venezuela, Sweden, India, and Australia, we were all surprisingly alike.
Sometimes we struggled with language, but we wore the same kinds of skirts and sweaters, and disliked the same teachers, and worried too much about what other people thought of us. Most of us also shared a notable tendency toward anorexia. It was not fashionable in those days of Twiggy to eat whole meals, so an astounding number of girls claimed that they could not possibly finish two pieces of toast without bursting.
As for my best friends and myself, we had another notable thing in common. We were decidedly uncool, and wholly dedicated to remaining so. From seventh to tenth grade, we had total contempt for ultra-popular kids who thought they were oh-so stylish.
And if Hollywood movies and celebrity interviews are any indication, that’s an almost universal trait in the United States. Although snobs and bullies rule the halls of home-town academia; nobody admits to being a snob or a bully in high school. And most people — including glamorous stars — claim that they were pretty awkward and nerdish as kids.
By the time I finished high school, I had moved from Michigan to Maryland to Denver and had learned to duck the whole issue of popularity by being totally dedicated to my boyfriend, my studies, and my penchant for taking long walks every afternoon.
I regarded myself as unassuming, reserved, and perhaps a little priggish, but nice. I thought I was always nice to everyone.
So imagine my surprise in college when I ran into some of the kids I went to high school with, and they thought I’d been a stand-offish prude in high school.
I suppose I should have been upset with that assessment. But it was a big school, and I’d been quiet, so I was thrilled that they remembered me.
NOW, HOWEVER, I realize that I usually went out of my way to be nice to people who seemed to be struggling. But I pretty much ignored everyone else. At that stage in my life, however, avoiding put-downs seemed more circumspect than geniality.
(And how was I supposed to know that even cool kids don’t necessarily feel cool in high school?)
In retrospect, though, I see my self-imposed exile as one of the best things about my adolescence. Although I rejected the mainstream, I had some amazing friends.
There was the brassy New Jerseyite who was so aggressively defensive that she sounded like a preview of Rocky: “So whud are you calling me? A freak or something?”
And my best friend, who was a raging feminist before the rest of us had ever heard of a women’s movement. I suppose it was because she had six younger brothers to take care of, and two working parents, a doctor and a nurse. At thirteen, Judy was adamant that she was not going to follow in her mother’s footsteps: “waiting on people day and night, at home and work.”
In tenth grade, there was the schizophrenic senior who introduced me to all of her friends from Mars. We used to walk to school together, but I always got cited for being late because she insisted that we cut through the woods to see if her friends’ spaceship had landed. The school excused her tardiness, but not mine, so I finally had to decide between walking to school with her or getting expelled. To this day, I feel guilty for leaving her behind — but that’s school for you.
There was also the devoutly earnest but annoyingly preachy Jehovah’s Witness who collected tarantulas and homing pigeons (which followed her everywhere she went); and the amiable 4-H aficionado from Montana who loved to can things and put up jellies (and who made the band-camp girl in American Pie look trendy); and the bitingly sarcastic, overweight girl whose popular football-playing brother hung out with smug, contemptuous cohorts who wholly unnerved us; and the beautiful new girl who everyone seemed to shun for no particular reason. The two of us made an odd duo. Jeannie was so obsessed with boys that she had ranked the top fifty “Mr. Good Bods” in our class. She dotted her “i”s with little hearts, dressed like a model, could never remember who was President, and had never finished a book. I suppose we shouldn’t have gotten along, since we were polar opposites, but she fascinated me.
All in all, I guess none of us were on the Gidget/Patty Duke/prom queen fast track to adolescent success. But my friends and I weren’t competing in some cut-throat, all-American teen popularity contest, either. And that made us fairly charitable in dealing with one another.
In eleventh and twelfth grade, I even had a respectable boyfriend who lent me a semblance of normalcy — or what passed for normalcy in high school. But I was grimly aware that my parents worried about me, and that they would have preferred having the student body president, or at least a prom queen. On the bright side, though, they already had a prom queen (my older sister), and it wouldn’t be fair to supply two to one family.
With thirty-five years of experience to go on, now I realize that I was probably a lot happier than most kids at that age. But you couldn’t have convinced me of that at the time. I would have said my life was pretty good, but assumed that everyone else’s was better.
You can’t live in America without seeing how much easier life could have been if you were only a little more like those iconic Hollywood teens. So sometimes I used to wish that my parents had stayed in the small town where I went to grade school.
Instead, however, I transferred into two big suburban schools in regions of the country where my clothes and mannerisms seemed to strike everyone as more absurd than wearing Christmas lights on Easter.
And for a considerable time, I tried to fit in. But nobody was fooled. I didn’t really care about hair, clothes, high school sports, school spirit, dances, proms, or who would be prom king. And it was hard to relate to kids who did.
I always thought that things would have been completely different, however, if my family had just stayed in a small town. And after raising two kids in a small town, I’m convinced I was right. My life would have been hell.
THE MOST UNEXPECTED THING about raising kids in Central Colorado is how thoroughly it destroyed my preconceptions. I thought that high school kids in a small town would be closer. And I thought that teachers would be happier because they knew everyone.
But it’s not that way. Teachers in small towns can feel boxed in. They worry about going to a local bar, or renting the wrong movies, or generally being perceived as the wrong kind of people.
And kids can’t escape their own juvenile follies. Everybody remembers if you vomited on the lectern during a sixth grade awards ceremony. Everybody recalls what a bumbling, stuttering mess you were in junior high.
When my kids were in school there were painful moments and maddeningly mean-spirited competitions, which I had never even imagined.
People my age know how awkward getting a divorce in a small town can be. You can’t avoid your ex or his new inamorata. And you can’t just put your old identity in a box. Everybody remembers. But at least you’re stuck with an adult identity.
In a small town, everybody remembers what a shrill, screaming kid you were in first grade.
Or if you were a smart, talented, and dazzling seventh grader? Well, you sure didn’t live up to your potential.
And kids in Salida compete in a manner that I didn’t encounter until I lived in a college dormitory.
But that should be expected; competition is fostered by the teachers, parents, coaches, kids, and community.
By the time my kids finished first grade, they’d earned more ribbons, awards, certificates and stars than I could glean in a lifetime. But it wasn’t enough. In a small town, there are only so many scholarships available, so many positions on the team, and so many leads in the play.
My school friends, on the other hand, almost never competed for the same awards, scholarships, or boys. At North Bethesda Junior High there were several gymnasiums, numerous auxiliary exercise rooms, and countless clubs and teams. And there were thousands of students at Walter Johnson High School. So my friends and I seldom even knew the same boys, or ended up in the same classes.
And anonymity has its virtues. My friends usually weren’t embarrassed by my faux pas, because they seldom heard about them. And my popularity — or lack thereof — didn’t really affect them.
THERE WERE CLIQUES, to be sure. There was the group that shot heroin out by the old oak tree, and the kids from the Baptist home for troubled youth who flaunted their delinquency by advertising orgies. The girls track team usually watched Dark Shadows in the student lounge at lunch. And the student patrol stalked the halls like belligerent Nazis.
That’s how I met my friends, though. My first day at North Bethesda Junior High, I didn’t know there were up and down staircases, so I ran up the down staircase, and a hall monitor blew his whistle and pushed me backwards. I landed in a sprawl at the bottom of the stairs, and some girls rushed over to see if I was all right.
Being more accustomed to a small town, I reported the incident, but I had to fill out a written complaint and then wait to hear back. By the time my appointment to see an administrator came up two weeks later, it no longer seemed relevant. I wasn’t going to be running up any more down staircases. And by then, I knew that the administration was proud of its amateur S.S. troops.
Besides, I had met people to commiserate with.
When I was in high school, a boy got hit in the chest with a baseball and died on the field. Three days later the school announced that a coroner had determined that the school had taken the correct action; the boy couldn’t have been saved.
Another boy dropped dead running the 440.
A friend of mine tried to commit suicide by drinking lye, and somehow swallowed a considerable quantity. She was sent to see a world-class specialist in Minnesota, but he couldn’t do anything, so she was put in a nursing home.
A year later, another acquaintance was sent to a private asylum after she tried to commit suicide for the third time.
Adolescence is tough everywhere. Parents, schools and communities never seem able to agree on what needs to be done. Should you restrict kids or trust them? Love them? Control them? Ground them? Police them? Or tutor them?
No one knows. So for the most part, kids rely on one another.
Like kids everywhere, my high school friends and I fought and regrouped on occasion. But we didn’t compete with one another for adult attention; and we didn’t resort to Eddy Haskell tactics. In those days, we were polite — or else. But there was no reason to waste time sucking up to teachers and administrators, because they were usually too overwhelmed by large classes and paperwork to remember students from year to year.
Today, I’m glad that I went to high school where there were too many teachers to compare notes so I could start fresh with every new class; where popularity wasn’t an hereditary right; where alliances and feuds weren’t set in stone; and where being a mite bizarre barely registered on the social Richter scale.
But Salida’s high school and middle school don’t strike me as too bad, either. The facilities are nice, the views are great, and the teens in Salida are seldom as intimidating as city kids.
Yet I frequently encounter students, parents, and teachers who are fed up with this place.
I don’t know if that means Salida has bad schools — or if it merely means Salidans have high expectations. But a recent controversy has made me abandon hope for America’s school systems.
NOT TOO LONG AGO, the American Civil Liberties Union notified the Salida school board that they were considering a case against our district because they viewed our school’s annual graduation prayers as a violation of civil liberties. And the board subsequently decided that graduation prayers were good, right and proper, but Salida would discontinue them anyway because our schools had better things to spend money on than a court case.
Although I applauded the board’s decision, I was a little disappointed that no member suggested that omitting graduation prayers might be a good idea — since a considerable number of residents have been upset about this matter for years.
On the other hand, however, numerous Christians in our community were far more disappointed because our board didn’t want to take on the ACLU. They thought that we should beat them at their game.
And that might be a possibility. The Supreme Court has made a muddy mess out of deciding when, where, and how much prayer is allowed.
But since Salida students apparently got to vote for whether they wanted baccalaureate services, it seems like Jones v. Clear Creek, a 1992 Fifth Circuit court case — which held that it was all right for a school to allow graduating seniors to vote on whether there would be prayers during graduation ceremonies — would support Salida’s case.
But unfortunately for those who want their day in court, that position was totally contradicted by ACLU v. Black Horse Regional Board of Education (1995), which established that it was wrong to let students vote to violate the rights of minority students, especially since schools don’t let students vote on anything else.
So Salida’s chances don’t look great. But with extreme luck, ceaseless prayer, and the recent political seachange sweeping our country, maybe there’s a tiny chance that our district could win.
But that would be a shame — because it shouldn’t.
FOR YEARS, I’ve heard Salidans complain about various teachers and administrators who imposed their religion on students and staff. I’ve heard complaints about graduation prayers, religious discussions in the classrooms, teachers who keep Bibles at hand, instructors who dispense more creationism than evolution, and prayer leaking into the system — here, there, and everywhere.
But the administration has done little to discourage this flagrant disregard for law.
And although parents often complained to one another — probably hoping that somebody else would do something — very few people have complained publicly — until now.
But parents were no doubt afraid that saying anything could prove difficult for their kids, or relatives, or business.
So what has religion come to when people are afraid of the wrath of its practitioners?
For the sake of all that’s right, good and holy, I wish people would think about that.
But I also wish that people would think about why so many Christians feel compelled to carry their prayers, bibles, and church services into the classroom.
Is it because of sex education? Are they afraid that secular humanists might convince their kids that pre-marital sex is good and abortions are necessary?
If that’s what’s worrying them, then fine. I’d support dropping sex education entirely, rather than having people pushing and pulling, preaching at, and proselytizing over one another’s children.
But whenever I’ve mentioned the Christian right’s fears to my liberal friends, they respond: “But at least somebody is teaching their kids something about sex. All they want to teach them is abstinence.”
Or say, “Well, at least their children aren’t ashamed of their sexuality any more.”
And I want to scream. Nobody seems to be able to leave each other’s children alone.
Despite my friends’ response, shame and innocence are important principals in some people’s religious beliefs. And the Christians who are fighting for prayer in our schools, usually believe that our schools are already teaching unacceptable beliefs to their children.
Today, schools are where Americans launch their nastiest political battles. And this time around, I don’t think compromise is going to satisfy anyone. Even if we allow prayers at graduation ceremonies, and prayers around the flagpole before school starts, and prayers in the lunchroom, Christian politicians will want to continue on to edit science, history, and psychology classes.
Because this conflict is not about prayer. If praying out loud were so important, you’d hear more people praying in corporate board rooms, restaurants, and airports — and on trains, busses, and planes.
This controversy, however, is about controlling one another’s children, and thereby controlling one another. And it’s probably not going to stop, because both sides are absolutely convinced that their beliefs are better.
But I don’t think any of this is happening because we care about kids. If we cared about kids we wouldn’t make them pawns in our political power games.
And I don’t believe for a minute that there is a person in this country whose immortal soul will be in jeopardy if he has to refrain from praying out loud in public for eight hours, either.
IN FACT, I believe that praying out loud in public will probably destroy your immortal soul, because if you’re praying in public, you’re probably not praying to God. You are praying to impress your neighbor.
And the Bible agrees:
“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret…. Matthew 6:5-6
But in this case, it probably doesn’t matter what the Bible says, or what I think, or what any court says. Because the war for the minds and souls of America’s children is escalating.
And even though I usually believe that people can improve things, it sure doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. And that depresses me.