It takes a village

There were, I know, several reasons for my leaving Greenway High School in 1976, but one of them--one I remember vividly--took place in a locker room. There were two freshman team coaches back then, each of us with our own team. My compatriot, I swear, had a better selection of freshman ball players. He won more games than me and my guys did, while I was learning that I cared much more for what happened  in the classroom than in the gym. 

But he was having some trouble with his players, his Black players, who were sometimes almost out of control. Now the high school's head coach was Black, so he told my coaching buddy that he'd talk to the kid who was greatly talented but driving my coaching buddy plain nuts.

I didn't  hear what it was exactly that the head guy said--a great guy and fine coach--but I couldn't help thinking that what went on behind those closed doors was a dialogue that neither me nor my friend could lower at the difficult kid. Behind that door, it was Black coach and Black kid. That made whatever lessons needed to be learned more possible.

I don't know if what I felt about all of that was racist or not--I hope not. But I remember feeling that this offer I had to teach at Dordt College, the place from which I'd graduated, the place where I'd more often than not danced happily outside the institution's modest codes as well as its overwhelmingly conservative politics.

Here comes the potential racism: I thought it would be good thing--I thought I would be a better teacher at Dordt than I was at Greenway because I'd know my students, know the hymns they sang in Christian schools all across the continent, know the codes and morals they lived with, even the  ones not stated. I thought I'd be a better teacher with a room full of Elgersmas and Van Dykes. I was a very good teacher at Greenway; the year I left, the students voted me Teacher of the Year; but I'd be better at a school like Dordt, I told myself, where I'd be with my own people.

I used to feel that way, too. That's why I never left. That's why I've done all kinds of work--writing work--for the denomination into which I was born and reared. Through all those 39 years I thought I understood my students, kids from strict but thoughtful Christian homes, like the one in which I was reared. I thought I was teaching students from my village.

I wish it weren't true, but I don't feel that way anymore. The vast majority of the people in my village have determined that our President will rescue us from the abomination that Joe Biden was. Eighty-five percent of the voters in Sioux County, the voters that surround me here, cast their lots with a man who wouldn't know the truth if it came right up and knocked out his front teeth. 

Now, as of yesterday, according to the King of Orange, Putin is a fine man and Zelensky is a dictator. Now. as of yesterday, the whole three-year butcher shop in Ukraine is the fault of Zalensky, not Putin, even though any adult alive at the time can't help but remember how Putin surrounded the country with his troops, all the while denying speculation that he was moving into the Ukraine. Then--oops!--he did.

But that's not faith, you say? I think it is, and I think I was taught to believe that all of life is religion, that our faith makes a difference in everything we do and say, in the culture we establish and direct.

Trump has unloosened the world's richest man to put the government as we know it on a chopping block. The man's team of hackers have free reign to run over you and me and the horses we rode in on, and Trump says it's all just fine because he said it is. His doormat Republicans have long ago been emasculated. 

"My people" are no longer my people, as I'm sure most of them would be happy to say. I think the old argument I used to justify returning to Iowa from Arizona was right, and I'm happy I made it; but in the last decade or so, I'm no longer part of the family, and I'm sure that's okay with most of those I used to consider my brothers and sisters.

It's sad.