Education and Power: What's a Boy to Do?

I've been thinking today about how power is an important part of education. Having it. Getting it. Using it. A lot of adults wonder why young people do the things they do, thinking them weird or fucked up or whatever. I think maybe it's a power thing. In the absence of any kind of formal control over the spaces of their lives, people (and not just the young) create spaces for the formation of control, self-sufficiency, identification, and so forth. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

I don't talk about this very often, but I think it needs to be said. When I was younger, I flirted with a lot of things that many adults would think of as dangerous: drugs, petty crime, satanism, white supremacy. Basically, I was a nerdy kid who wished with all of his heart that he was someone. Someone respectable. Someone of consequence. Someone nobody could fuck with.

It's hard to say where that comes from in my case. I suspect it has a lot to do with being an introvert and with moving around a lot. I went to a lot of different schools after my mom and dad divorced in 1974. My brother and I lived with my mom and she had... poor taste in men, shall we say. Never really any abuse, but a lot of domination games, and tough guy BS from them. In any case, when I was in school it always seemed like I was on the outside of a lot of what was going on. Worse, I don't really think I understood sociality. I didn't really interact with other kids very well, I suspect. I had some very intense friendships, but they seemed to go wrong in the end. Too intense for my friends, I think. Sort of clingy, maybe. I think that kind of rejection is what led me to punk rock. It's a lot easier to live with yourself if rejection is self-delegated, and if you have a bunch of other losers to hang out with.

Moreover, you have power. People are forced to notice you. Some fear you. That's heady stuff if you have an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in most cases of social interaction. School, generally, was not a place where I felt powerful. I was not "in with the in crowd," or at least not often. I was good at school, because, mainly, my reading level was pretty high. I thought "older" than I was. Emotionally, probably I was not nearly so well developed.

Later, when I got out of high school and started college a year early, I lost my edge. I was no longer among the smartest kids. I mean I was smart, but I was too lazy or distracted. I dropped out and eventually joined the Marine Corps at 17. While this was going on, my friends, a group of guys colllectively known as the Southeast Dicks (We're not a gang, we're a club!), started drifting into the skinhead movement. I wasn't far behind. In the Marine Corps, it's pretty easy to be a racist. There's lots of them there. I was a pretty cowardly one, because on some level I think I knew I was wrong. But that's the thing. Combine powerlessness with illicit power, and you are able to shift the frame of self-reference to some extent. You become... more than you were. You are, in the words of Josef Goebbles, a small part of a large dragon.

But I was more or less a pussy about the whole thing. I ended up, most ironically, saving myself from my racist self because of Ice T's music. Imagine that. I could see myself in his words. I could recognize his and my humanity. I got out of the Marines shortly thereafter, and was able to a large extent to leave those things behind. Before that happened, though, two of the Dicks, then known as East Side White Pride, Ken Death (Mieski) and Kyle Brewster killed a black man from Ethiopia. It was not something I could find any triumph or joy in. Some poor guy, Mulugeta Seraw, was killed with baseball bats outside of his house. What for? For not moving his car out of the way. For talking back to a "white man." What bullshit.

I was a thousand miles away and the brutal killing of an innocent man still stains my heart. I am still ashamed for ever having wanted to be like that. I constantly watch myself, and make sure I don't fall into the trap of easy power again. I live my life differently now. I try to be honorable and not just powerful. More than anything, I want to make up for it somehow. I especially want to help young people who have no power. I know why they want it. I know how some of them try to get it. Some of it is not such a bad thing. So you freak out a few prudes or religious zealots. Big deal. Fuck 'em anyway with their smug superiority. But when you hurt, slander, kill and maim for the sake of feeling better about that weakness you carry deep in your heart, then you have failed to act as a real human being. When people become tools to make you feel powerful, then you are running a con game on yourself. You think you're a warrior, but you have no honor. None. Honor takes a long time to come back. The scars of knowing you were a fool last forever. Confession doesn't heal you by itself. You must do penance as well. Even then, you still wonder, "Is it enough. Is it ever enough?"

So, when adults wonder why kids join gangs, or get stoned instead of going to class, or hang out with thugs and dealers, I think I know what they don't. In the absence of power, people do what they think they gotta do. They lie, they steal, they cause fear, they use other people for sex and other things, and generally dehumanize everyone not exactly like themselves, and even some of those folks as well. In the process, they slowly kill their humanity. Some never get it back.

When a system of education does not recognize the importance of power to young people's development, particularly their self-development, then it does them a disservice. It can be dangerous to them. It helps no one. Kids need power, self-directed action, autonomy. Sometimes it can be dangerous to grant them what they want. I think it's even more dangerous to make them steal that power. That's what I did.