Sunday Musings

My sister died of brain cancer when I was four years and five months old. It was a devastating experience. I started school when I was four years and nine months old.
That experience was not much better. Today, I would be labeled a troubled child with behavioral issues. Back then I was simply a discipline problem.

I could not have put it into words back then, but my problem was injustice. The profound injustice of losing my sister and no one willing to talk about it or her. The petty injustice of having to go to school when I didn’t want to. And the simple reality that life goes on and sometimes you get school teachers that are not very good at it.

Mrs. Brewster, and that is her real name, was not a good kindergarten teacher. I don’t even say that it was her fault. You have to so something for a living. But she was one crummy teacher and not a very nice person either.

One day, I was stood in the corner for some infraction. I probably deserved it. I was not a good student. But I believed my treatment was not warranted in this case and said so. Mrs. Brewster walked over and slapped me across the face. Hard.

I told my parents she had hit me. My mother didn’t believe me and my father said I must have deserved it and gave me a good one of his own. So much for justice. Although, what never occurred to me until much later was that nothing in writing had been sent home documenting the slap. I know now that only the principle got to wallop the kids. Again, so much for justice.

More defiance on my part, more slams and slaps.

Eventually, I came to realize that’s all they had.

I spend some time over on the forums, mostly the one about gay marriage rights but others as well. You gain a unique perspective, listening to the ideologues on both sides of an issue yell at each other without listening at all. And every so often, someone leaves a post that more or less voices their opinion, states there is no reason for this discussion in the first place, suggests the Bee shut down the site and finishes off with “We won, you lost, end of story!”

I’ll bet they slap their children. Because that’s all they’ve got. They parrot some lines they heard on the radio or read in a brochure, decided they liked what they heard and that’s it. End of story. I’m right and you are wrong. We won, you lost, end of story.

I’ve even googled some of the lines I’ve read and found the damned brochures and sites they see them in. Don’t they have any original thoughts? When pressed for a few, then they just call each other names.

I don’t ignore injustice and I won’t ignore bullies on either side of an issue, even if I find myself allied with them in purpose. So I don’t give a damn if it has been voted on or not. Maybe in the Amerika these clowns come from you can shut off discussion, but in America we don’t do it that way.