A teacher with 20 or more years of experience enters a classroom. It could be a classroom of any age really, but let's just say it is a 2nd grade classroom.
The teacher places fingers to door handle and can feel the vibrations of the chaos within.
(S)he opens the classroom door to
mayhem.
Cross-classroom games of catch are being played with stray or snatched hats and shoes. A number of students are huddled against one wall playing a loud game of Pokemon cards. More than a few have pulled out hand held gaming devices, ipads, ipods or iphones. In far corners are the escapees--the thinkers, the readers, artists, writers, dreamers, unperturbed by the squalor. Several varieties of roughhousing are going on. Chairs lay on their sides. Food wrappers and crumbs litter the floor.
In the center of this is the defeated teacher, undoubtedly trying not to cry as (s)he helplessly tries to restore order.
Teachers will recognize this scene. Experienced teachers will recognize walking into a classroom like this, and feeling the blinding empathy for the desperate colleague in the center. And all teachers will recognize the sensation of losing control of a class, even for a moment--most likely from their first few years of teaching, although in truth, it can happen any time, and with incredible speed.
I have been back in the United States for almost 6 months now. When I left for Japan in 2011, the United States was a troubled place, but there was hope. Now it is 2015 and I have returned to the national equivalent of the classroom I just described above.
Other countries are the experienced teachers, standing at the door, empathizing with us but hesitating to do more than watch because they know that the idea of needing to be saved only works in tired fairy tales....and it would most likely damage our delicate American pride.
So they watch from afar as we shoot each other and slowly drown in our own fear and contradictions and confusion. And the noise that can be heard from outside the door? That's the tumult of our ignorance and hate--for ignorance and hate are always louder than reason and peace.
Yet the reason and peace ARE here. There are peaceful, logical, thoughtful people everywhere being drowned out by the loudest, the most poisonous, the wealthiest, the most ignorant and most powerful.
Perhaps it is time for those of us in the corners--the thinkers, the readers, the artists, the writers, the dreamers--to make a little noise of our own.
