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By Root 367 0

class to go up there and utter nothing. So we stood there and refused to sing the carols, our silent protest against censorship. By the second song, intimidated by the stern looks from their parents in the audience, most of the protesters joined in on the singing—and by the third song, I, too, had capitulated, joining in on “0 Holy Night,” and promising myself to live to fight another day.

High school, as we all know, is some sort of sick, sadistic punishment of kids by adults seeking vengeance because they can no longer lead the responsibility-free, screwing-around—24/7 lives young people enjoy. What other explanation could there be for those four brutal years of degrading comments, physical abuse, and the belief that you’re the only one not having sex?

As soon as I entered high school—and the public school system—all the grousing I’d done about the repression of the Sisters of St. Joseph was forgotten; suddenly they all looked like scholars and saints. I was now walking the halls of a two-thousand-plus inmate holding pen. Where the nuns had devoted their lives to teaching for no earthly reward, those running the public high school had one simple mission: “Hunt these little pricks down like dogs, then cage them until we can either break their will or ship them off to the glue factory!” Do this, don’t do that, tuck your shirt in, wipe that smile off your face, where’s your hall pass, THAT’S THE WRONG PASS! YOU—DETENTION!!

One day I came home from school and picked up the paper. The headline read: “26th Amendment Passes—Voting Age Lowered to 18.” Below that was another headline: “School Board President to Retire, Seat Up for Election.”

Hmm. I called the county clerk.

“Uh, I’m gonna be eighteen in a few weeks. If I can vote, does that I mean I can also run for office?”

“Let me see,” the lady replied. “That’s a new question!”

She ruffled through some papers and came back on the phone. “Yes,” she said, “you can run. All you need to do is gather twenty signatures to place your name on the ballot.”

Twenty signatures? That’s it? I had no idea running for elective office required so little work. I got the twenty signatures, submitted my petition, and started campaigning. My platform? “Fire the high school principal and the assistant principal!”

Alarmed at the idea that a high school student might actually find a legal means to remove the very administrators he was being paddled by, five local “adults” took out petitions and got themselves added to the ballot, too.

Of course, they ended up splitting the older adult vote five ways—and I won, getting the vote of every single stoner between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five (who, though many would probably never vote again, relished the thought of sending their high school wardens to the gallows).

The day after I won, I was walking down the hall at school (I had one more week to serve out as a student), and I passed the assistant principal, my shirt tail proudly untucked.

“Good morning, Mr. Moore,” he said tersely. The day before, my name had been “Hey—You!” Now I was his boss.

Within nine months after I took my seat on the school board, the principal and assistant principal had submitted their “letters of resignation,” a face-saving device employed when one is “asked” to step down. A couple of years later the principal suffered a heart attack and died.

I had known this man, the principal, for many years. When I was eight years old, he used to let me and my friends skate and play hockey on this little pond beside his house. He was kind and generous, and always left the door to his house open in case any of us needed to change into our skates or if we got cold and just wanted to get warm. Years later, I was asked to play bass in a band that was forming, but I didn’t own a bass. He let me borrow his son’s.

I offer this to remind myself that all people are actually good at their core, and to remember that someone with whom I grew to have serious disputes was also someone with a free cup of hot chocolate for us shivering little brats from the neighborhood.

Teachers are