Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (109 page)

In early 2009 an
uninsured driver (asshole) broadsided me at the crossroads of a busy
intersection. Without a mobile phone, I walked into the gas station and asked
where the pay phone might be. You would have thought I had asked to use their
telegraph. Pay phones do not exist any longer because we have been led to
believe everyone owns a cell.

We had one
rotary phone in our kitchen when I was growing up. This was the 1970s, not the
1930s, so quit rolling your eyes. If that phone rang between five and seven in
the evening, my father would lose his mind. He would stand up from the dinner
table and remove the phone from the cradle, yank the coiled cord as far down
the hall as possible, and explain to the telemarketer or distant aunt how rude
it was to call people during the dinner hour. The rest of the meal consisted of
dad mumbling under his breath about ripping the thing off the wall.

Today my father
is in his sixties and has a cell phone clipped to his belt. He will answer that
fucking thing anytime, anywhere. He works in construction, and I have seen him
answer his cell phone with one arm while at the top of a thirty-foot ladder and
hanging on to a gutter with the other hand. What scares me is that you may not
find this all that unusual.

We have become a
society of hyper-individualists. You are most important. If you want a
fascinating read, check out
Generation Me
, by Jean Twinge. She does a
comprehensive and incredible breakdown of this from the inside, as she was born
in the 1970s. Twinge argues that Generation Me lives by a strict,
individualistic code. It is not intentionally selfish, and they are not spoiled
but are results of societal parenting choices that began in the 1970s. We feel
so empowered by ourselves that we must carry a device that allows us to
communicate with any other hyper-important individual at any time, no matter
the altitude.

“Big deal,” you
say. “Mobile phones provide a convenience and safety we’ve never had before.”

True, but like every advancement in human history (I know about every event that has ever occurred because I am a historian), it comes with a price. Rampant hyper-individualism destroys empathy. It must. Empathy is the ability to put one in the situation of another, to attempt to feel what another is feeling. That cannot exist with hyper-individualism, which declares that you are the center of the universe and the most important thing ever. Start listening and you will hear it everywhere. Phrases abound such as, “You’ve got to love yourself before you can love someone else,” or, “You have to look out for yourself,” or, “Do what makes you feel good.” All of these illustrate the emphasis on the individual. To have empathy, to care about the feelings of others, you must sometimes say and do things that are not in your own best interest, hence the rub.

If you take a
closer look at advisory programs, character education curricula, or the like,
you realize that young minds of Generation Me, taught from birth that they are
unique, special, and the most important thing in the universe, find the
“instruction” of empathy completely vapid and useless. The media, their
parents, their coaches, and their peers all place the highest value on
individualism, and then for forty minutes every other week they spend time
talking about exclusivity and the feelings of others. This is like having Barry
Bonds teaching a class on herbal supplements. We created the emphasis on a
home-run record, an individual achievement. We put the men chasing these
records in the spotlight. We hold out the promise of endorsements and mansions
and mistresses, and then we tear them down when they use any means to achieve
it. I am not advocating for steroid use or cheating, but that is the
often-overlooked consequence of hyper-individualism because it benefits the
individual without regard to the impact on others.

So how do you
teach kids to be empathetic, good people, caring towards others?

You can’t.

Of the three
million years (closer to six thousand years for the born-again Christians
keeping score) humans have lived on the Earth, educators have used the
classroom model for two hundred years, or 0.0066 percent of the time we have
existed. For thousands of generations, parents passed along life’s most vital
secrets to their offspring with nary a worksheet, term paper, or text message.
And yet we think that the most important and efficient means of transferring
skills and history to the next generation is in a room with a teacher.

My next
proposition could sound so foolish that you might just believe it. Good
character is not taught, it is modeled. If you look through the research, you
will find that the single most effective parenting skill, and therefore
teaching skill, is modeling. Parents recognize the inverse of this as the “do
what I say, not what I do” principle. If you smoke, your children have a very
high probability of becoming smokers because you are one. You can explain the
risks, the health concerns, show them the pictures of your cousin’s throat hole.
But if you smoke, they will smoke. This simple principal works in every facet
of education. If parents do not read, kids will not read. If parents use
violence in the home, kids will be violent. Be a bigot, raise a bigot. You must
be what you want your children to be.

So many
educators complain about the proliferation of mobile phones in schools. The
electronics distract from learning, shorten attention spans, cause global
warming, make your toilet leak, and more. Starting in middle school and through
higher education, teachers fight a losing battle against the all-pervasive
device. However, those same teachers complain about it with a black box on
their hip, do the BlackBerry prayer, or run from a faculty meeting to take a
call. I have watched administrators checking email on a BlackBerry in front of
the student body. I have seen faculty walking through the halls while holding
personal conversations on their cell phones.

If you can help
it, please do not call my dad during the day, as he is probably on a roof or in
the middle of rewiring a house.

***

Lonely teachers
have a new hobby, and I call it “kid gossip.” It is a lovely byproduct of
social engineering.

“Good morning,
Mrs. Jones, Principal. How may I help you?”

“Hi, it’s
Janice, Bobby’s mom? He came home very upset, and I think we need to talk.”

“Sure, what’s
the problem?”

“Well, Bobby
said that there are kids wearing sweater vests.”

Pause.

“Sweater vests?”

“Yes, sweater
vests. Apparently, kids are telling each other to wear sweater vests to school,
but they aren’t letting everyone know. They didn’t tell Bobby, and now he’s
quite upset about being sweater vestless.”

“That’s the kind
of exclusive behavior we cannot have at our school. I will get to the bottom of
this.”

Mrs. Jones then
proceeds to gather the faculty around the water cooler to brainstorm ways of
infiltrating the gang of sweater-vest ruffians and stomping out the exclusive
behavior. Mrs. Jones bustles through the hallway, shaking her head and taking
notes on a legal pad.

This serves
several purposes. It allows Mrs. Jones to inflate her sense of importance and
sets her on a task that she thinks can only be tackled by an administrator (bullshit).
This sense of self-importance can be annoying, but it’s harmless. However,
Sweatervestgate has negative consequences as well. The process of investigation
labels behavior by a group of friends as “exclusive,” disposed to resist the
admission of outsiders to association. In other words, friends. The kids have
good friends. At some point in the recent past, this became exclusive behavior
on par with bullying.

The Social
Engineer in your child’s school believes, with a golden heart, that all
children must be friends. They must hold each other’s hands and sing happily
around the campfire. If you show preference towards another student or group,
you have, by definition, excluded everyone else.

What the folks
in charge do not understand is that childhood itself is a paradox. Children are
not trying to destroy each other through sleeveless plaid cotton. In a way,
they are saying to each other, “I want to be different than everyone else, and
you should be different with me.” They do not have the courage to stand alone
as a true individual, but they yearn to stand apart from the pack.

At lunch,
faculty meetings, and recess, the Social Engineers engage in kid gossip. The
focus moves from issues of academics or growth to issues of “who is secretly
disliking who” and how we can put a stop to that. Keeping in line with the
heavy-handed approach of the Social Engineer, schools institute events such as
the “mix-it-up lunch.” This gem of social construction forces kids to sit at a
table of random peers during one of the only times in their day that is not
structured. The theory is that the children will realize how much they love
each other and no longer engage in exclusive behavior or other trends of
friendship. Imagine a ride you have taken on a subway or bus, and now imagine
eating lunch with those strangers and being forced into conversation with them.
Fun!

Schools, the
media, our culture, and the lure of the salaries of professional athletes send
the message that you have to “stand out from the crowd” or “be yourself” or
“blaze your own trail” or “wear your own sweater vest.” And then, in almost the
same breath, we tell them that they cannot be exclusive, that it is not morally
proper to be closer to some than to others. If you still have doubts about the
role of the individual within our culture, consider The Decision made by LeBron
James with the help of the global sports media. It could not have been more
about him.

***

In eighth grade
I left Catholic school and entered the dangerous and brutal halls of the local
junior high school. In Catholic school, the seventh- and eighth-grade classes
totaled thirty kids. We all knew each other very well, which made school dances
as much fun as spying on your sister when she was in the bathroom.

Coming to a
public junior high with over fifteen hundred students was as much of a culture
shock as seeing Culture Club on MTV for the first time. I can still hear the
electronic chime that signaled I had 3.5 minutes to get from my present
classroom to the next, which happened to be about a continent away. The
structure was built in the 1950s prior to the architectural concept of stairs.

Probably the
most awkward phase of my life in the new junior high was the school dances.
Kids with acne, parachute pants, and shirts with many zippers (no sweater
vests, thank God) entered the gym. The seventh-grade boys lined the wall on one
side, while the seventh-grade girls lined the wall on the other. In the middle
of the floor, the eighth-graders moved in clumsy circles, dancing like
department-store mannequins. Entering the school in eighth grade, I lacked the
experience of seventh grade and had no clue where to put my hands on a girl’s
hips, or what that tingly sensation meant when I did.

I quickly became
friends with Sean Lipchick, a semi-crazed pervert who I think is sitting in
jail for manslaughter. (I cannot verify this, but I am not making it up,
either.) When the lights went down in the gym and the music started, we would
sneak through the pulsing mass of pubescent odor (smells like teen spirit) and
grab a handful of any girl’s ass that happened to be within striking distance.
Most times we got away with it, leaving the girl with a frown on her face as
she pulled her leg warmers up in disgust. On rare occasions, we would be seen.
And on one very hilarious evening, Steve took a punch to the nose.

Steve and I, and
others like us, worked hard not to fit. We enjoyed our exclusivity. We reveled
in being outsiders. At the time, I thought we were cool. In retrospect we were
as dorky as everyone else, bent on being unique with as many people as
possible.

I am really sorry, Kathy McKracken. I was
the one who grabbed your ass during the spring dance in 1985. Two years later I
had my friend deliver anonymous love poetry to your locker while we both sat in
psychology class. I apologize for my exclusive behavior. My crush was just on
you.

I Can’t Get No Respect

The Buick’s rear
tires tore through the grass, spewing a haze of brown dirt into the air. It
hung on to the humid mist of the August night. Evan’s tongue poked out of the
corner of his mouth while the Marlboro Red smoldered from the other.

“Dude ain’t
givin’ up,” he said.

I held on to the
dash as my fingers felt the sticky residue of dried Coke and fast food
deposits. I turned over my left shoulder to look at Kevin and Mike in the
backseat. They reached for the stained seatbelts, and the whites of their eyes
stuck out against the muddy brown interior.

Evan swung the
car to the right, and the rear end of the Buick fishtailed between a stop sign
and a fire hydrant. The front wheels struck the top of the curb and launched us
into minor orbit before the shocks came down hard and rattled our teeth.