When I write things I want to say, things that buzz around in the back of my mind I am sometimes stumped by how to express them. Sometimes it’s because I’ve never been in quite the right situation to bring those thoughts together. Tonight I read this, and allot of things clicked. A military veteran who went into teaching after the service wrote this. I did make a few changes to better suit what I’m trying to get across but nothing factual has changed just some cleaning up of some profanity. He no longer is a teacher. This is his story;
I was about 24 years old when I received my teaching certificate. Fresh out of college, my first assignment was the gigantic — how shall I describe it? — gray limestone edifice known as Central High School in inner city Columbus Ohio. We lovingly refer to Central High School as The Rock — and it is kind of like Alcatraz. It’s right on Route 40, which is the old Wilderness Road that goes through Cumberland Gap and on to Colorado and beyond.
Right down the street from us was the old massive brick building of the Ohio State Mental Hospital. Some people get those confused — Central High and the mental hospital. My first year there I, got them confused, believe me. In the third week of December, just before Christmas break, I got a most sobering introduction to public education. For those of you that are non-teachers, right before Christmas break is the most dangerous time of the year because the little dears have now been in school for about four months — an incredibly long amount of time. They haven’t been out on the streets much, and they miss all the “jive” — and so it’s cruel and unusual punishment to keep them in school so long, I suppose.
It was then that I received one of the most vivid and lasting lessons about public education that I have ever experienced. I got a glimpse into the innermost “liberal” recesses of a teacher’s mind. I was raised in a liberal family but, I wasn’t a liberal by that time, but they surrounded me, as a teacher. Let me tell you about the day that I actually saw the depth of their doublethink.
My room was on the second floor, overlooking the teachers’ parking lot. It was an early afternoon in December. The steam heat was stifling on the upper floors — you know how those old buildings are; you can’t turn the things off in the summertime, and in the wintertime they just go full blast. So I had my window slightly open. I was jabbering on about something when I heard a clear “pop-pop” like the sound of a small-caliber pistol being discharged. As I looked out the window for the source of the sound, I distinctly saw a male shooting into the windshield of a car. From my vantage point I saw it clearly. I couldn’t have been more than 20 or 30 feet away. I then saw a man, who I recognized as the Auto Shop teacher, run out to confront the shooter. To my horror, after about 15 seconds or so of conversation (I couldn’t, of course, hear what they were saying), I saw the shooter point the gun at the teacher, aim, hesitate, bring the gun back to his body, eject the shell from this cheap revolver, aim again — take deadly aim — and fire. The teacher let out a cry and I did hear that. The teacher went down. And of course the assailant fled.
I called the hall monitor to take my class and went down to the teacher’s aid. He was sitting up and holding his lower chest when I got to him. What was amazing was that it couldn’t have been more than a minute or so from the time I heard the shot to the time I arrived at his side, but already there was a throng of students surrounding the teacher — with their ghetto blasters going… It seems the sight of blood just makes them go nuts. And that’s exactly what they were doing. He was completely surrounded by these types.
The teacher, whose name was Edwin Peters, was a kind, grandfatherly Industrial Arts teacher in his fifties. He really didn’t have to be a teacher, but he was dedicated to trying to help these inner city kids.
He was having trouble breathing from what those of you, who like me have been in the service, will know as a sucking chest wound. What happens is that the shell enters the diaphragm and you have problems breathing. You have to take care of it right away or the person’s going to suffocate. You have to stuff something in the wound — and that’s what I did. He rested more easily after that and some of his color came back. He was sheet-white when I first came down. But it seemed to me that he was even more embarrassed than he was hurt. He was embarrassed by his surroundings, by this jovial throng; embarrassed by his life’s blood spilling out in the parking lot.
He then started to talk — and this was the most amazing part of the whole incident for me. He spoke not so much to me as just generally, in a general sense. He was in shock, sure enough, but it wasn’t a shock that was totally debilitating. I got the distinct feeling — and even today I feel this way — that he was trying to convince himself of something. It was as if the event that had just happened to him, was something totally outside the realm of his comprehension. And embarrassment and confusion just welled up in him.
He started talking, and of course this is going to be paraphrased but I think it’s pretty true to what he said. He looked around, and he looked at me, and then he said, “Apollo was a good person.” And that kind of threw me. I didn’t know what he was talking about. And he continued talking. “He must’ve needed that money for a Christmas present. I told him to put that gun down. That’s a felony. It would be a felony to shoot someone. And it would ruin his chances for the basketball scholarship”.
Peters is telling me this stuff while he’s sitting there bleeding. “I know his mother. I’ve talked to her. She’s a fine lady. She tries hard. But she’s has 9 other kids… and it’s hard.” You know, that kind of stuff. He babbled on in that vein for some time. And it suddenly dawned on me — the entire story of what went on: who this thug was and what had happened.
I’d known this Apollo. I’d seen him around. He was the previous year’s basketball star. The next year, which is the year I’m talking about, he became a senior but was too old, at 20, to play basketball. So he spent most of his time roaming the halls. You don’t want to get him out of school, you know. You have compulsory education in Ohio until you’re 18, but if you’re nice and don’t cause too many problems — if you don’t gun down the teachers and stuff like that — you can stay ’til you’re 20, 21, 22… even bring the wife and kids to the graduation; that’s all right.
I’d had run-ins with him when I was on hall duty. And Apollo, was no shrimp, believe me. I’m 6′4″ and he stood about 6′7″, 230-240 pounds. A very, very dangerous youth.
Now Apollo mostly hung around the cafeteria. And he knew the schedule. He knew when the cafeteria worker took the day’s receipts to the bank. And that’s what he was waiting for. He was waiting for that chance. When I looked down from my classroom window, he was shooting into the windshield of the car belonging to the cafeteria worker who was taking the money to the bank. He chose that day to strike. Peters had intervened, unarmed, to try to “reason with the boy.” And that’s a direct quote from Peters’ mouth.
Apollo, probably enraged at the disturbance, purposely shot Peters — and there was no mistake about it. It was just animal instinct, like when you take a bone from a dog. Miraculously, when Apollo first aimed at Peters, his cheap 25-caliber revolver misfired. What did Peters do? Did he rush him? Did he run? No. He stood there and “tried to reason with the boy.” Those are his exact words.
Apollo coolly ejected the faulty shell, rechambered a fresh one, and shot Peters with deadly accuracy. And at ten feet, a 25-caliber pistol proved to be deadly. All this came rushing back to me while I was helping Peters remain calm. At first I didn’t understand what Peters was talking about, the ravings of this “liberal” mind. “Don’t blame him,” Peters said. “It’s his background. His mother tried.”
As he lost more blood, the circle of youth’s became louder and they started jumping around, their ghetto blasters were blasting, and they were “doing their thing.” And it became even harder for me to follow what he was saying. “I had him in class. He’s a good worker,” Peters said. He was talking about Apollo. His mind reeled under the inconsistency of his code of beliefs and the actual fact of his predicament. And I believe that his mind was telling him, No, Peters, you’re not lying there on a parking lot, dying from a gunshot wound… you’re just at a pep rally. He just didn’t fully understand.
Never once in the approximately five minutes that I held him up there before the squad came did he ask about himself. And I thought that was a phenomenal situation. The entire time, Peters tried to convince me — or convince himself, or convince somebody — that Apollo didn’t do what I saw him do with my own eyes: shoot him. His last words were — and I do remember these quite vividly — “Where did we go wrong? It’s not his fault.” And then he said “His fault — his fault….” Just like that. And I kept thinking that at the last second, Peters finally realized the enormity of the crime that had been committed against him.To this day, I don’t know, but I have that feeling.
He lost consciousness for the last time as the squad came, and he died on the way to the hospital. The bullet had hit the bottom of his heart. Now Peters really was a typical teacher. Middle class, hard working, established. Just a nice guy. You know what I’m talking about? Just a nice individual.
And like all nice folk’s everywhere, especially teachers, he was a chronic sufferer from a disease we have in our race known as solipsism. In philosophy, one form of solipsism, the one I’m talking about, is the belief that “the world is just like me.” The belief that, “All can be reasoned with; everyone’s relatively nice.” And this “mirror image” fantasy so clouds the mind of “nice” folk’s that they’ll go to their needless deaths — and, believe me, there are going to be a lot of them going to their needless deaths — clinging to phrases like “Come reason with me and we’ll work things out…. Just give the poor better housing and education and they’ll be like Wally and the Beaver, or David and Ricky just playing the guitars in the family room… and Dorothy and the Lost Children are still in Never-Never Land.”
It’s this “niceness,” this kind of solipsism that says everyone is just like us, that’s drilled into Americans from the first day of kindergarten to the day they graduate from public school. “Be nice. Don’t rock the boat. Get a job. And everything will be all right. It’s the 50’s again. Everything is fine.” But they never stop to think that about 90 to 95 per cent of the world isn’t the America of the 50’s. It isn’t “liberal”. It isn’t middle class. It certainly isn’t nice. And it doesn’t suffer from solipsism. Much of the non-western world is just like that gang of youths excited by the site of a good man’s blood. Much of the non-western world wants to see America’s blood.
