Sobering Pressures

Whatever one feels about John Ridley and his second season, I do not remember high school being as serious for teenagers as we all once were. In my era, drugs were a disruptive issue, but we never had lock downs and aggravated sexual assaults on the grapevine, and this was at the beginning of the Carter Administration, 78-79. In my district, somewhat affluent, like Leyland, bearing in mind this is Pennsylvania we're talking about, as opposed to Indianapolis, diversity was moot. Spastic was the diversity, not African Americans. I did not slam into class conflict and the cultural wars over black and white until the uproar at Widener over Huckleberry Finn and how to teach it. I pitied my academic advisor, Michael Clark, whose memory is one of the few instances of hallowed ground for me, I pitied Mark Twain, his legacy, and his towering achievement being obliterated over a pejorative which in the 19th century was part and parcel of linguistic currency, good and bad. It's a word, and when I use it I don't use it to "take away its power," as some angry black comics do, ones we no longer hear from-- I'll look it up later-- regardless of my context. When John and I had a heated debate at the tables of Cafe Walnut last summer and I said it in anger that was an accident, but I was hurting because a Market Street rent a cop denigrated me for going into my ATM, and I'm lucky I did not end up drawing the police on a holiday; perhaps it is a symptom of degeneration (I looked it up because that was one diagnosis that slipped by in the field) and the actor journalist was right. Taylor's mother had a serious illness, and we would have never seen anything like Pollari's assault on network in my youth. It was brave of ABC, maybe too brave, how easy it is to die like that. I took it, because that was what life was like for my deceased brother and his clique, but I'm amazed ABC allowed us all this brave linguistic honesty, the truth of our volatile dysfunction.

Now I need digestion time.