An Unknown Citizen Gets the Point
Delivered by Debbie Seabrooke at RC's 1999 Commencement

 
At breakfast, I am talking to my husband about high school. Do you remember a lot of tension between the hoods and the jocks? I ask. I am reading in the newspaper about two boys who felt like outcasts at school. We didn't have preps. We didn't have Goths. But there must have been some tension. Who were the groups? My husband says he doesn't remember. We were all pretty much the same, we all got along. 
 And then I remember that I was asleep until twelfth grade. It is Senior day, in April, and last night, I was up at school, decorating the halls. Now we hear on the radio that Martin Luther King is dead. All I care about it that we might not have Senior Day. When I get to school, I see their faces, the black kids. We are still calling them Negroes in 1968. They are walking through the halls like zombies. Loretha and Thelma, two of the girls I play with on the hockey team walk right past me. A minute later, Lou Turner, the kid who sits behind me in social studies, and who has teased me all year that he is going to get me on a date and take me to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Lou walks past me and doesn't return my smile. It doesn't sink in until another friend of mine, Brent Berman, gets angry at a remark I make that the assassination has ruined Senior Day. Brent is Jewish. He says to me, God, Seabrooke, are you an idiot or something? Ruined Senior Day?

It is the first day of the rest of my life, I think, because I am catapulted out of my complacency and the message comes thundering in suddenly, about second period, on my way to English, when Berman tells me I am an idiot. 

And I was.

I was the Unknown Citizen in W.H. Auden's poem. I held the proper opinions for the time of year My teachers reported that I never interfered with their education there was no official complaint against me  I wasn't odd in my view, I was popular with my friends and liked to fool around every once in a while But at the end of this poem about his happy man, Auden asks, and I will change the gender only Was she free? Was she happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we certainly would have heard.

I think I was happy, of course. Happy in the way we like to think innocent kids should be. I don't have to mention anything but the name of a small town, Littleton, Colorado today to call up pictures in your mind of how that ideal of innocence-before-adulthood is shattered for you. But I think, actually, it is part of a continuum that started, for me, anyway, the day MLK was assassinated. The day Lou and Lorene and Thelma couldn't bring themselves to smile at me anymore. 

I didn't like the black kids looking at me that way and I didn't like Berman calling me an idiot with that exasperated tone. I was angry and hurt at the putdown, but the more I thought about it, maybe there was something wrong with me. You don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? I had heard Bob Dylan sing and finally, I started to think that maybe the song was about me. 

What's now coming out in the papers about the Columbine High massacre is that people sort of knew something was amiss, but they were confused. Do I talk about it? What if its nothing? The kind of thought it was a little unusual, but he didn't think of calling the police. OKAY. I can understand that. But you get a whole chain of people doing that friends, parents, maybe a teacher, maybe even a cop and one-day it will explode. It will come in the form of a bullet or a bomb. It will take a great hero down. And it will also explode inside YOUR chest. Didn't you feel something go inside of you the moment you heard about the shootings at Columbine High?

I say that the day Thelma and Loretha wouldn't look at me and Berman told me I was and idiot was the first day of the rest of my life because I began to be aware of some important things. 

That I had advantages, being white, that my black friends didn't, and they stomached the complacence every day. They were even nice to me. They probably thought I was just to clueless to count. 

I became aware that being a white Protestant gave me privilege, too. 

Brent Berman, whom I had dated and been in a school play with, was Jewish. His family live of the last street in my neighborhood. Not one of the identical tract house like the one I grew up in, but different, newer, with a sumptuous white carpet in the living room, a grand piano, gold lamps set further back from the street then our houses. People talked when that Jewish family had moved in so close. Brent and his brother took some college-level courses at Hofstra.  As if they think their kids are better than ours kids, was what went around for a while. I had dismissed the remarks. But I wasn't Brent. I wasn't Jewish. The remarks weren't meant for me. 

I became aware that the poorer kids in my school, a lot of the ones who were on the vocational track taking most of their classes at Wilson Tech were the ones talking about signing up to fight the Vietnamese. Their girlfriends took the hairdressing courses, and planned to marry him before they went off to be soldiers. The guys they drove their hot Chevys to school before catching the bus to Wilson Tech and they and their babes would hang around outside the school doors, defiantly smoking on public school property until Mr. Settle, the assistant principal with the Marine haircut would run out yelling that they all had detention. Who cares? I'm going off to fight in another month or two, they much have thought. I'm leaving this stupid school and all these phonies behind. 

I have not ever been able to bring, myself to see the movie Platoon. I know Lukes just shown it for Core classes.  The movies about the guys who went to Wilson Tech, who took car mechanics and knew how to make an old Chevy into a dream machine. For a while, I dated one of those guys, Frankie Camarda.  He had a souped up 57 Chevy, a black and white two tone, and I dated him for a lark. And just before Frankie graduated (he had never invited me to his house on the other side of the tracks where the Italian-Americans lived) he enlisted. And I never saw him again. And neither did his family except in a coffin at a military burial to which I did not go. 

And then Bobby Kennedy got shot right around prom time. And some of the kids at school who were working for Bobby at the campaign headquarters downtown in the afternoons were now crying on this sunny June morning right during our Public Speaking class. Me, well, I was working after school downtown at the Eugene McCarthy headquarters, sticking pushpins in a map to indicate the areas we had just canvasses on the telephone. And OUR peace candidate was still alive. All of the Bobby Kennedy kids started coming down to the McCarthy headquarters and we worked together. We were just a bunch of white kids from the suburbs of Long Island. At home, I was having violent arguments with my father about the war. He said that if he were president, he'd line all the conscientious objectors against a wall and shoot them. And I became aware of just how big the battle was. (And, wait a minute, that sounds like what an 18-year-old Eric Harris typed on the Internet about blacks, about how he would like to eliminate them. I know there's a difference between saying something and doing it. But it is worthwhile to pause a minute and wonder where we are going when the solution is bullets, so convenient you can store a personal arsenal these days right in your own bedroom.)

We played the lottery now. I was a freshman in college and there was no such ting anymore as a deferment for privileged white boys who were in college. No, now everybody might be eligible. What number did your brother draw? What number did your boyfriend draw? There was crying again. In my dorm, we listened to the radio as the numbers were read. It went by birthdays. Some girls jumped up and clapped. Phones were tied up all down the halls. The senator reading the lottery number out on the radio would match it with a birthday randomly drawn from a rotating barrel just like in a bingo game. I sat there listening for my brothers number. He got a bad one; his birthday was read out very early in the bingo game. Suddenly the glasses he wore, for which he was teased all through high school, were a plus. Maybe he would flunk the physical. 
We were bombing Cambodia. Some of my friends were in the SDS. We marched on Washington. We closed down some buildings on campus. The president of our university resigned. Was the university coming apart? An American History professor hung himself in the basement. 

Wait a minute. I know what some of you are thinking. Oh its another one talking about how much harder, and more dramatic times used to be. But listen, I'm not out to make myself into something better than you. I followed the crowd. In fact, as Berman told me that day, it took me a little longer, maybe, to catch on. I needed people to tell me how it was. There were people who knew more than I did and I listened to what made sense. And I did act. But not alone. 

Now we've got another war. This ones scary, too, and somehow its easier than ever to push things away and not think about them. People of my generation are now out driving urban artillery tanks to pick up steaks at the supermarket. 

On the surface, the racisms not blatant. And, my God, NATO looks like a bunch of high tech heroes dropping justice via smart bombs that are supposed to know a missile silo from a Belgrade suburb. College campuses are quiet. We've got Neo-Black societies, on Southern campuses; we've got Salsa and were learning all those Latin steps (will we ever learn to dance the way they do?)

But inside us, there's a voice saying the worlds still in chaos. In fact, the infection that was easy to see on the surface thirty years ago its gone deeper. We've got to listen to each other. We've got to talk. Don't ever think that you're living in a time when there's no cause to fight for. All you need to do is look around. Its just not so simple. Simple is easier. Simple is what I had. But this world needs you badly. I hope some kids from Columbine High. I hope some of you from UNCG, from Residential College even, will start waking up the others, getting the conversation going. And if you have to hurt someone's feelings to make her wake up, shell thank you for it. 

Maybe everybody has a day she says was the day she woke up. Mine was Senior Day, 1968, the day Martin Luther King died. And Brent Berman called me an idiot for not understanding. My high school was named John H. Glenn, after the guy in the rocket, hope of America in the days of the space race against the Russians. Their high school, Columbine, is named for a flower that grows in the spring when all things are still possible. 

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