In 7th grade, at Loch Raven Junior High, in Towson Maryland, a short jog from the Baltimore City line, I was taught critical reading by a social studies teacher. One of the tools he used, in 1975, was to have me read up on the caste system, in India. I found this to be fascinating. He then had me drawing parallels, across cultures, comparing social status and economic position with birth rates.
It became glaringly obvious, even to my 12-year-old mind, that the wealthier people were the fewer children they had, and that the poorer people were the more children they had, across the ages and around the world. This drew a pal over my utopian upbringing, in which my parents had taught me that parents had children according to how many little people they thought they could provide a happy life for. It appeared that I lived in an anomalously robust economy. The teacher told me that birth rates were about to fall in Europe, and would follow suit in America.
It all made sense. For most of history, children were brought into the world to learn survival, so that by the time their parents were unfit to tear a living from the cruel world, they would be able to depend on their grown children.
I have since learned, through life and through the reading of thousands of books, that such is the human norm; that I was born into a staggeringly abundant economy.
When I was transferred to Trinity Middle School in Washington Pennsylvania the next year, I was slotted in the gifted and talented group [they did not dare call it a class, but instead named it inclusively] based on my college reading level. However, this also meant I was in the toughest math and science classes, which resulted in my flunking out of school within a couple years.
I did learn one great lesson. I came face-to-face with the estrogen breathing liberal dragon of white female privilege.
A question about India arose. Having read two books on the Sub Continent I was thrilled to raise my hand. However, I was not needed. This big fat doe-eyed girl rose in an Indian outfit of the rich kind worn by the Brahman Caste of priestly aristocrats. The female teacher and the mother stood on either side of the girl. The girl and her family had lived for a year or more in an affluent area of India and had just returned.
The girl stated such truths as the fact that Indians did not have to work hard, and had everything they needed, because of their rich culture and giving society. She also indicated how nice it was to be around such large families with so many children, not just the one, two and three child American household.
Insisting on being heard, I invoked last year’s lesson in comparative anthropology; that Indians had to have a lot of children so that they could survive old age, and because infant mortality was so high.
The mother bristled at me for suggesting that there was any poverty in India, pointing out that they picked fruit from roadside trees as they strolled with their Indian friends.
I countered that they had obviously been entertained by a Maharaja of some kind, in his gardens, fertilized by dead gardener carcasses and that the lowest caste of Indians, the Untouchables, lived in grinding poverty and many of their children died in childhood.
The girl began to cry at the thought that starving children might have been hidden from her view and was comforted by her mother, who glared at me as she hugged her big watery-eyed child.
The teacher was troubled with my persistence in insisting that children starved in India, and brought the male math teacher over to decide if I should be cracked, which was the penalty for everything in Trinity Middle School. The student would be bent over and beaten by a male teacher with a paddle designed with sadistic intentions in shop class, whose students were exempted from getting cracked!
I was pissed that these hick teachers in this shit water town my father moved us to where either so stupid as to believe in a society without class or economic divisions, or were lying to us kids and punishing me for speaking out. I had already contemplated murdering the Gym teacher after he disapproved of me declining to be his personal poster child. [This incident is related in the book Taboo You.]
Aside from the shop students, there were other classes of kids exempted from paddling: football and wrestling team members, whose coaches did the paddling, and man-beard whack jobs itching to knock a sissy teacher’s teeth down his throat. The math teacher just mumbled something to me about not upsetting the ladies and skulked off to his desk.
Earlier in life, I had learned that adults were deluded, and that my parents were the most witless of all. See this early piece Through A Glass Darkly. But now I discovered that there was a worse enemy than a parent, a teacher, who was charged with forcing us kids to accept patently false lies about the very nature of the world we lived in.
The nature of this inequitable world was all around us and plain to see, as my brother and other smallish boys were cracked with vicious regularity, their cries echoing through the New Age open class rooms, while big mean assholes like me were left alone by the sissy teacher men.
As I think back, I can recall no earlier blatant collision between my young mind and liberalism, the ideology of weepy moms, sissies and the brain-scrubbing neutered bipeds in adult attire known as teachers. After this point I basically ignored my teachers, read what I wanted in class, and when asked to close a window on the real world and look up in faux obedience to my master, I would sit and fantasize about abducting and enslaving the female teachers—perhaps selling them for a mo-ped, and by all means keeping Miss Murphy in my room—and beating the male teachers with my hands. I decided, in my fiendish bid for independence, that I would live according to the Conan stories that I read, which depicted a real world of inequity, where the strong rose and the weak fell, rather than the fantasies woven by the simple-minded brain-whores at the head of the class.
Which reminds me, that my belief that public schooling in the United States should be utterly eradicated came early and had nothing to do with reading libertarian tracts in the 1980s.
1976, is when I first saw the Mommy Lie for what it was.
When did you first come face-to-face with The Lie?
Readers, feel free to add your first encounter with our Monolithic Mommy Lie.
James, 1969, that was when a some of the older brothers were coming home in the coffins, Vietmam was in full swing, I lived in a Mormon community. Believe it or not I knew about staving children, some of the youth in our town had seen the wider world already, as missionary's or military, sometimes both. I noticed the more affluent were usually not drafted. The white trash went first. I would listen to war stories at deer camp, WW 2, Korea, Vietnam. The old to the young would speak their minds, I would sit and listen fascinated by the gruesome way of men. Your story about the starving children really caught my attention, I told my mom to send the food I wasted to the starving masses in other parts of the world, major ass kicking for that comment. My father never did put up with a smart ass child. I was only bullshited when I was little, after 10 yrs old you started receiving the real story, my father was a history freak, plus one of his friends taught me in middle school. He started me in Roman History, told me that we were following a similar path in our nation. This is a small part of my life at age 13. Thanks James. Ishmael.
Addendum, at age 10 my friends dad showed his sons and I pictures of the liberated concentration camp they had dicovered, he had a German Luger, asked him how he got it, said he shot the son of a bitch that owned it.
Amen.
Having been to India, I can tell you the squalor is like none other in the world. Hinduism is a disgusting religion that institutionalizes poverty. The poor, you see, deserve it because KARMA. The rich are the lowest-class, most ill-mannered you will find in the world. Their behavior makes the Davos crowd blush.
Yuppie whites see themselves as Brahmins and should be exterminated along with their counterparts on the Sub-Continent.
Happily, the meek shall inherit the earth.
For me it happened actually when I walked through the doors of a church at 18 and sat under a real man who taught me the hard truths of life and I actually read the Bible which explained so much about our current human condition.
The second time was shortly thereafter when I went to a conservative college that had the guts to teach something outside of what was mainstream acceptable. I will always be grateful for that man and that college which opened up do many doors.
It is really refreshing to get such a positive story coming out of Church and School so recently.
I have a few friends in Baltimore that, in escaping from poor living circumstances, joined Churches that offered schooling, or at least libraries. These fellows have read many more books through their Church libraries and curriculum than my youngest son did to earn his 4.0 grade average and diploma. These men, who began their education around 30, have developed the ability to learn through conversation while discussing reading material, which is something I rarely see in 25-year-old college graduates, who are only conversant in their field.
I am hoping that the proliferation of churches and religious networks will raise the literacy rate among men and reverse the aversion to reading inculcated through our feminist education system.
Thanks, Sean.
I must have been about 7 or so, definitely no more than 8 when a Nun told the story about Saint Patrick explaining the tripartate nature of the Christian God to the Celts using the shamrock (a type of 3 leaf clover) as being "three in one" (a bit liek the oil, I suppose).
As I was an early and precocious reader and interested in Celtic, Roman and dark Age Britain, I knew enough about the Celts to know that you would need to explain the tripartate nature og God(s) to them about as much as a Professor of mathematics at Harvard or Yale would need a lecture on the decimal number system.
I pointed this out and ate my meals off the mantelpiece for a few days afterwards ... guess why.
So, trap shut, take everything with a pinch of salt and double, triple check anything that you are told by a teacher was the result. I never had much use of formal religion after that.
I love this story, Phil.
Thanks
Early voracious reader. Steady diet of Howard and Heinlein during formative years. Heinlein was one subversive SOB. Also about 7th grade started to try to get outside SciFi genre. So read random stuff the old man had on shelf. Discovered Clockwork orange and catcher in rye that way. Even forced myself to read Rise and fall of third reich! Discovered London Steinbeck and harper leethu this too. Man I’m one warped dude.
Never had epiphany with teachers. Sorta oblivious back then