Lessons in Equality

As I get older—my big eight-oh is virtually two months away—I find myself sloshing through my childhood, my awkward youth, with ever-increasing awe. I’m not talking so much about “memories” (that time I broke my finger playing football, let us say, or that crush I had on Patty in first grade), but something larger, quieter, less clear: moments of unexpected awareness.

These are moments of becoming. And they’re still with me. They’re still creating who I am, which is why I’ve decided to write about them again. I tossed a few of these moments out into the world a couple years ago, but since they’re still relevant to the world of today, I’ve decided to revisit them.

One such moment occurred after I had a punch-out with a friend after school. Then I bicycled home, with bruised knuckles, a torn pant leg. I parked the bike behind our house and as I dismounted, I felt consumed by an awareness I couldn’t shake off. Gosh, that was stupid.

Maybe fighting is part of kid life, but it’s also utterly valueless. I got hold of myself, calmed down... and decided I would never fight again. This wasn’t a flimsy, breakable rule I decided to impose on myself—you know, try to behave better—but something much, much bigger. In that moment, I claimed, well, partial agency over my own hot temper, and eventually beyond that: over the collective anger that had a grip on so much of the world. I decided I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. This was well before I was in any way “political.” I was 11. I read the sports pages; that was it. But the stupidity of real-life fighting remained a scar on my psyche for the rest of my life.

Everyone is a genius. Everyone matters. We all have a unique perspective on the unknown.

When I was 13, I had another stunning moment of becoming. This one was far stranger, far less obvious. I hardly understood it. It was caused by a movie. The year was 1959. My mother, sister and I went to the local theater one Saturday afternoon and saw—I have no idea why—Imitation of Life. It wasn’t funny or cowboy-and-Indian exciting. It was a social drama about, for God’s sake, race: a black woman who works as a maid, whose daughter is light-skinned enough to pass as white and chooses to do so, separating herself from her mom.

I’m not sure if the movie is any good, but I did watch a small piece of it a few hours ago and was pulled deeply in. Indeed, I was shocked—the ending slashed my heart: At Annie’s, the mom’s, funeral, Sarah Jane, the estranged daughter, pushes through the crowd of mourners and clutches hold of the casket, crying for forgiveness. She had pushed her mom—who loved her dearly—out of her life so she could live as a white person. As she lies atop the casket, she cries, “I killed my mother.” And the movie ends.

As I say, I was 13. The civil rights movement had started up in the South, but I had no connection with it whatsoever. I was a teenage white boy living in an all-white suburb in the Midwest. I knew there were bad people around who did racist things, but what did that have to do with me?

So the movie hit me by surprise. I’m sure I had no emotional protection from its heart-cutting ending, nor did I have the ability to wrap it up mentally under the label “race,” stash it away, and move on. I was simply... well, troubled. And I’m sure we didn’t talk about it. We just headed home.

But then something happened—which had nothing to do with the movie. We had car trouble. Mom pulled into a garage so we could get the matter fixed. It apparently was not a big deal. They started working on it, and we just sat there waiting. I’m sure I was doing my best to put the movie and the emotions it stirred out of my mind, but there’s no doubt something deep had just opened in me. I didn’t know what.

The car was ready. We started driving home. And boing went my mental lightbulb. I had a thought, and the thought is beyond strange. It seems to have had no relationship to the movie per se, though apparently it emerged from the troubled confusion I was feeling. Even now it makes no sense. I silently told myself: I’m a genius.

Huh?

I can only guess what that meant, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with being measurably super-smart. Rather, somehow, I was suddenly aware... of God knows what. Perhaps the value of life. I had just seen over the edge of ordinary, over the edge of what we’re supposed to believe, into a deep unknown. I had seen beyond the answer to the question.

In retrospect, I believe this moment pushed my sense that I was a writer, and that life was mine to discover, not simply “be taught.” I also believe the takeaway from it was: Everyone is a genius. Everyone matters. We all have a unique perspective on the unknown. As I rode home with Mom and Sis, I clutched this like a precious stone, a blue pearl, perhaps, hovering in my psychic void.

And finally, three years later: Here’s me at age 16, about to have another moment of awareness—thanks to an encyclopedia salesman. Actually, I think it was just Volume A, which we got in the mail after joining a book-of-the-month club. Ever the eager learner, I started scrolling through the volume and came across a description of the book The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. I was intrigued, and on Saturday I went to the public library and checked out a copy.

I spent the rest of the day in bed and read the whole thing. Oh my God (so to speak). I had grown up in a churchgoing family and had never particularly questioned religion, but Paine’s critique of Christian theology hit me hard, in particular because I had also recently read the book Exodus, by Leon Uris—another book-of-the-month arrival. That book had opened my awareness of the creation of Israel (I’d no doubt get extremely frustrated with it today) and Jewish people in general. I knew nothing more about this than I did about civil rights, but I felt moved by Uris’ story.

And the two books in tandem opened up an awareness I couldn’t tolerate. According to what we’re told to believe, nonbelievers—that includes Jews, all of them—go to hell. In no way, no way, did I give any credence to this, and because I was the person in charge of my own beliefs, I immediately decided to leave the church. The next morning I told my mother, who was shattered. She also loved me dearly, and we struggled for years over this—and eventually our relationship transcended all theology. Our love for one another was bigger than that. And I began calling myself a “trans-believer”: curious about every religion, open to spiritual wisdom wherever it comes from.

And I couldn’t be happier, or more grateful, for these moments of awareness, which, as I wrote, are still creating me. And they support my core belief about life: All humans are created equal.