#logaesthesia

Today, September 20, was the Global Climate Strike. Around the world, people with day jobs took their jobs off to protest global warming. And students -- college students, of course, but also kappatwelvers -- ditched school.

Leading the call for the climate strike was Greta Thunberg, a teen-age girl who has been cutting school for months to call attention to the urgency of climate change, an issue leaders like Donald Trump just don’t seem to care about. Thunberg thumbs her nose at compulsory education, and given what K-12 schools in the U.S. can get away with making their students do, or not letting their students do, she’s absolutely right to.

I have read that Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s. This piqued my curiosity as to whether Thunberg may have any problems with compulsory education because of her Asperger’s. I say this because my own disability, logaesthesia, shaped my views on compulsory schooling.

In my junior year of high school, the wood grains on many of the desks at my school were bothering me more and more. Many of the formica desks had this recurring sicklocyte shape on them -- it reminded me of an eye. I would need to scrape these eyes off the desks as I saw them, even if the desk wasn’t my own.

One day, I had just finished history class and was headed towards the homecoming skits in the auditorium (that year’s theme was Dr. Seuss books). After I walked out of the history classroom and it was locked, I looked inside and accidentally saw the desks in there, all of which had the eye formica pattern.

I panicked. Then I got an idea. I threw my five-dollar bill lunch money inside the classroom, through a window, and decided to tell the assistant-principal, Mr. McGinnis, that my money was locked up in the history classroom.

All the eyes that I saw, all the occurrences of the words “eye” or “I” that I heard, and other words that had the diphthong /ai/ in them (like, might, time, my, by, find, etc.) were accumulating inside me as I waited for the classroom to be opened so I could scrape the eyes off the desks and begin purging them all off.

I reached the auditorium, where I heard the skits. The freshman class did “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” Then the seniors did “How the Grinch Stole Homecoming”, a (faculty-censored) skit in which the senior class steals the other classes’ homecoming floats, but magnanimously gives them back at the end. Lots of /ai/ sounds. I saw Mr. McGinnis in the crowd, and said, “Mr. McGinnis?” No response. I repeated: “Mr. McGinnis?” Still no reply.

Then I said, “Mr. McGinnis?” loudly. He didn’t budge, and I concluded that my assistant-principal was ignoring me.

The homecoming rally finally ended. I was able to find the library assistant, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who had the keys to all the rooms.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick opened Mr. Hart’s history classroom for me. I grabbed my dollar bill, and scraped the “eyes” off every desk in the room. But by now I had hundreds of “eye”s to purge off. I thenI left and followed Mrs. Fitzpatrick into the library.

Once in the library, I hid behind the shelf of paperback novels. I closed my eyes and begin purging and chanting “adolye, adolye, adolye”, hundreds of times. My nails were down at my groin.

Before I finished purging, Mrs. Fitzpatrick saw me. “Inappropriate!”, she said. “Please go and eat your lunch!”

That “inappropriate” was the last straw! I then began crying and hyperventilating, crying and hyperventilating. I made it all the way to the office, still crying and hyperventilating.

Mrs. Abel, the school nurse, saw me in there and heard me. “James!”, she said. “Stop making that noise! It’s very loud and very disruptive!” Noise? Hello?!? It’s called “crying”! You do it when you’re sad? And disruptive, dischmuptive! This was lunchtime, for Pete’s sake! How could any disruption occur then?

I said I couldn’t stop crying. Mrs. Abel said, “Your mother told me that you’re able to control the things you do”. I explained to her that my mother was referring to the purging, not to things like crying!

I went to Mr. McGinnis’ office and told him everything that had happened. He called my mother to pick me up. My mother arrived and I was still crying and hyperventilating. “Close your eyes and breathe in”, she said.

My mother drove me home. Mr. McGinnis was no longer on Campolindo High School’s campus, having driven home for the day. As my mother drove me home, I told her about the wood grains and the purging and everything. I told her how Campolindo wasn’t made for students with OCD. She asked if their treatment of students was too uniform, and I said it was.

I was forced by state law to afford school (the school-leaving age in California was and still is 18, not 16 as in many states). Once I got to school, I got put into situations where I had no choice but to purge, and because of the conservative faculty culture at Campolindo, my behavior was called “inappropriate” (a label I have a real problem with). I now realized that high school students (and grade school students) were forced to go to a place where their freedom was taken away. This made school, by definition, a prison.

All the things like the hat rule (”Take your hat off inside the classroom!”) or the dress codes that forbade baby tees were now seen as indications of a prison -- a prison for people whose only crime was being the wrong age. And the senior homecoming skit? After the fact, an article was written in our school newspaper about skit censorship. It quoted a boy from the then-senior class saying, “This is the tamest skit we’ve had in years, and they’re still hacking away at it!” I now viewed being forced to go to a place with censorship as an indicator of a prison. I also learned about Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier in history class. This was a Supreme Court case wherein the court ruled that censorship in school papers was constitutional! I was infuriated by the concept.

I was talking with my father, who said I had to go to school, and told him I didn’t like high school. “Too restrictive?”, he asked.

“Yeah”, I replied.

“Well, the purpose of high school is pretty much to teach you what your restrictions are going to be in life”. Why have an institution that existed only to teach restrictions? Especially many restrictions that were going to be lifted in college! And sure, adults often say “Preparation for the workplace”, but what if you don’t want a corporate office job (and this applies to the majority of Millennials!)? What if you’re going to be a bricklayer, or a rock star, or an MTV cinematographer, or a field linguist, or an avant-garde philosopher who publishes books about your radical philosophy?

I even remembered going to a bookstore and reading on a laminated summary of sociology that education was conservative. The reason therefor was that education’s purpose was to socialize, and that teachers were typically upper-middle-class White people who had a lot of stock in the status quo. Basically, teachers (like Mrs. Dahlgren in my play The Bittersweet Generation) set out to indoctrinate students in arbitrary social norms: “Don’t put your hands in your pants.” “Tuck your shirt in.” “Take your hat off inside a classroom.” “Boys, hold the door open for girls.” “Don’t talk about lower bodily functions.” “Boys can’t wear their hair long.” “Don’t cross-dress.” “Don’t be gay.” Ad nauseam.

The scales had fallen from my eyes. There was no going back. I was now a youth-rightser for life.

Luckily, my peers -- the first Millennials -- were making a distinct turn to the left, in reaction to the Jones/Boomer/Greatest culture of curfews, school uniforms, unbridled parental authority, social conventions, tightening gender roles, homophobia, patriotism, trust in big corporations, and desire to prepare their kids for the corporate workplace that dominated political and social discourse at the time -- the Bill Clintons, Tipper Gores, Bob Doles, Fred Phelpses, James Dobsons, William J. Bennetts, Newt Gingriches, and Pat Robertsons of the world. I grew a beard at 17, as many of the other boys at Campolindo were doing. I was able to communicate to my peers: “The state is forcing you to go to a place that forces you to take your hats off!” The Students’ Far Leftist Union, or SFLU, was formed at Campolindo before 1996 was over.