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Friends United Meeting |
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September 1999
Violence as Ingratitude for Time
Dee Cameron
"Mama! Mama, oh, help me!" cries the boy, while a woman shouts at him to stay still and keep his hands on the chair she has provided to brace him while she hits him with a piece of wood. The woman is a school administrator, and she is following the rules. A teacher is present as a witness, and either there is a document on file or there has been a phone call permitting her to hit the fifth grader as punishment.
Who is this "mama" the boy calls to in his pain as if some part of his distressed mind expects her help? He is in foster care, so nobody but he knows exactly whom he imagines as he calls.
Whoever she is, I know I should stand in her stead, rip that office door open and grab the piece of wood. They need a mother in there, and I know I am one by the way the hair stands up on my arms as I hear the screams.
But I am an employee whose own children's welfare depends on me, so I stay at my typewriter turning out cards according to the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules while they play by other rules across the hall. I sit still and burn with shame.
If I were to open that door, I would see that those rules made specifically for an assistant principal and a student have let a multitude of other people slip in, some of whom I recognize. I see a large person hitting a small one. There is a black hitting a white. A female is hitting a male, too. I'm pretty sure I see one learning disabled person hitting another. I see a woman who is helping to raise her daughter's child hitting a boy. The same woman is hitting a child in foster care. What with the others who are there but invisible to me, there is a melee going on in that office.
The pair that troubles me most of all is the well-educated, middle aged person hitting the ten-year-old. No matter what her considerable troubles may be, life has lavished time on her. She has lived longer than Jesus or Anne Frank or unnamed millions. She has had time to grow "in wisdom and stature."
And she has had help in the growing, because she has had a long formal education. In fact hers has been the grueling, often boring, teacher's education that teaches, if nothing else, that the culture's catchy truisms are often false and that frequently the effective thing to do is not the thing that comes naturally. But she's doing what comes naturally right now.
"What have you done with your luck?" I want to ask her, who has so far escaped death by any of the illnesses and accidents that might have had her. "Why did we not expose you on a hillside after your birth?" My voice wants to rise. "Or set you out on an ice flow when your teeth began to rot and you weren't pretty anymore? Why did you get to live a Mary's life of listening to lectures and reflecting when you might just as well have been scrubbing with the Marthas for all the good it seems to have done any of us? Look at yourself! Is hitting all you can come up with when you don't get your way?" Oh, yes, a mother is badly needed in that office right now, and not just by the boy.
It's not easy to do what comes unnaturally. "Sit here while I tend to Jennifer," I said to a second-grader named David after he had punched the girl in the gut for taking a library book he wanted. "This kind of thing will happen to you again and again," I hissed, "and you're going to have some time now to plan ahead for what you'll do next time it does." When I checked in with him later, he seemed genuinely proud of the results of his reflection. He had decided, he said, to hit very softly from now on.
Of all kinds of punishment, the physical kind has a nearly unique relation to time. It cannot be made right in the future. Words can be taken back and soothed with other words. Money can do something to compensate for lost things. Demotion can be reversed. But there's no taking back a beating.
One morning when I was new at middle school, a boy threw another student across the library. Because the facility was undersized and crowded, the victim didn't go very far, but the act needed to be addressed. After classes started, I looked up the offender's telephone number in a thick, computer generated register kept on the counter in the office. The list showed each student's class schedule along with other vital statistics. The boy had a common first name, and his surname was unusual but famoussomething like Jason Picasso.
Jason's mother sounded small, tentative, and perplexed. She asked no questions and simply thanked me for calling. I wondered if he beat her up.
I had been surprised to notice that Jason Picasso was in the honors English class, and when I met his teacher in the lounge the next day, I told her about the incident. "Jason Picasso?" she said. "Small, quiet, oriental-looking?"
"No," I answered, horrified. "Big, blond, and smart-mouthed." Together we ran toward the office.
"Let's look in the cumulative folders," she said. "They have pictures."
There were cumulative folders for two Jason Picassos. Mine was new to the school and so did not appear in the register that had been printed prior to his arrival.
I called small, quiet, oriental-looking Jason's mother, afraid that he might have suffered some unretractable punishment because of my error. "Oh," the soft voice assured me, "we talked about it and I knew there must have been a mistake."
One thing that pleases me as I imagine their conversation is my own insignificance outside the bond between them. Neither the mother nor the son bothered to explain my error to me let alone complain about it. My accusation was irrelevant; my mistake barely rippled a moment of their lives. With such a relationship in his past this particular Jason is unlikely ever to try lobbing his fellow man across a room.
Have you ever imagined what it must be like to be the mother of a person about to be punished capitally? I do, every time I read about a death sentence being carried out. Even if your son or daughter were the most despicable lout imaginable, wouldn't everything in you drive you to be in that room, tearing off the cuffs, so that time with all its outstretched chances would not end abruptly for one whose role in your life had been, from the start, to let you accompany him through time, changing and growing.
"Not this way!" the mother of an Allentown boy who ultimately killed her is supposed to have said, face down on the floor during an earlier attempt on her life. "If you're going to kill me, do it while I'm standing and facing you." Up against her own murder, she retained her firm if desperate footing in one of life's most elemental teaching relationships, and she continued to teach. When later he did kill her, he gave up the best opportunity life gives anyone to learn to live like a human being.
There are plenty of troubles with violence, most of them well known and appreciated. Add to them the insult to time. Violent punishment spits over its shoulder at the past and all the chances it offered to stock up on ways of handling rough times. The present, that short span in which all of one's personae huddle and choose strategy before running out onto the field of the future, is barely lived in at all. The future sustains the worst damage from a kick in the shin or an electrocution. Destructive force limits the future unalterably.
Dee Cameron is a recently retired librarian and a member of El Paso (Texas) Monthly Meeting, and a contributor to Best of Friends, Vol. I.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting
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