The Petition (Part 4)

Blogger's Note: Having both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett -- two icons from my youth -- die on the same day, as I'm already in the midst of intense high school flashback, is beyond surreal. I certainly hope Henry Winkler is not planning on swimming with sharks (as opposed to jumping them) anytime soon.

The longer I write this, the more new flashes from the past keep popping in my head. Maybe instead of spending seven years in psychotherapy during the late 90s and early 00s, I should have been blogging. Except that blogs didn't exist then.

I truly hope to wrap this up today, as BW and I are flying tonight to NYC for Pride Weekend and then a visit to my parents on Long Island, and I likely won't be able to do any blogging until next week. Plus, as cathartic as this exercise is for me, it's also incredibly draining. Sort of like... well, psychotherapy.

On with Part 4:

Junior year came to an end. Mr. Stubick threw a little pizza party for the "Tower" staff and its regular contributors at which he handed out personalized certificates of merit to each of us. Mine read: "To Adam Sank.... for confronting anti-Semitism, eating lots of pizza and wearing an earring." I suppose it was a nice gesture, but it felt patronizing to me, fuming as I still was over Stubick's editorial bungling of my penny piece.

(A side note about that earring. Like every other boy my age that year, I had gotten my left ear pierced in attempt to display rugged individualism. My mother's reaction? "Everyone's going to think you're a fag!" As if singing and dancing in all the school musicals were shining badges of heterosexuality.)

My senior year began. "The Tower" resumed publication. I don't remember writing anything for the paper the first several months of that school year, probably because I was busy flunking AP Calculus and writing out my college applications.

Then, in February, I was accepted to join a group of SHS students on a trip to Washington for the annual Close Up program. It consisted of a week-long stay at a hotel in the nation's capital, with daily trips to all the federal buildings and monuments and brief meetings with our elected representatives.

I had a blast. Staying at the hotel with us Summit kids were students from Nevada as well as from Glassboro, NJ, and every night was a party. One night the Close Up organizers threw us a banquet, and I decided to organize a little talent show (with me as the star, of course). Flanked by five other guys in sunglasses, dark blazers and white t-shirts, I sang a parody of "Stand by Me," inspired by our grueling program schedule.

And if this historical monument... that we look upon
Should crumble and fall.
And the White House should tumble to the Sea.
I won't sleep... I won't sleep.
No IIIIIIIII won't.... sleep a wink.
Just as long... as we roll... through DC.

So please don't, please don't sleep... in DC...
Noooooo don't sleep... in DC

etc.

It was a hit.

One afternoon, on a bus tour, the topic of apartheid came up. This was 1989, the height of the "Free Nelson Mandela" movement, and there were news reports out of South Africa every day of the week. Yet one of the Glassboro students, a girl named Lori, had no idea what we were talking about. "What's apartheid?," she asked.

"It's a system of government in South Africa where white people have all the power and black people are kept down," I started to explain.

Lori interrupted: "But I thought Africa was a nigger country?"

No one believes me when I tell them that I was almost 18 years old before I ever heard someone use that word in person. But it's the truth. Years later, I would live in Atlanta and hear it on an almost daily basis. But at 18, having been raised by my parents, in the town where I grew up, that word was worse than any swear. It was unutterable.

The force of it literally knocked the wind out of me. And somehow, it was even more shocking when coupled with the ignorance that would lead a high schooler to regard the whole of Africa as a single country.

When I got back to Summit, I felt compelled to write about the apartheid exchange for "The Tower." Having already done a piece on anti-Semitism, it seemed like my obligation as well as my beat. But whereas the penny piece had been an indictment of Summit's own occasional smallmindedness, my new essay, entitled "Lori in Wonderland," was intended as a sort of pat on our back. For of all the things I had learned on my trip to Washington, none were more eye-opening than a fellow Jersey high schooler's assertion that "Africa was a nigger country." It made me both proud of and grateful for my school and my town to realize how far we were from that level of ignorance.

In retrospect, it was a rather arrogant tack to take. "Oh, look how much more enlightened we in Summit are than you wretched souls in Glassboro." Without knowing it then, I was criticizing the sin of racism while simultaneously committing the sin of classism.

But Stubick had no such quarrel with "Lori in Wonderland." Or if he did, he never said so. The piece was slated to run in the next issue.

Except it didn't.

Ever.

To be continued. I'm sorry -- honestly. If you knew what I'm dealing with today at this hideous job, you'd be amazed I was able to type out this much. More later today if I can.

Homo in flashback. ♥