In Which I Nearly Commit Career Suicide...

Well, I don't.

Today I did my annual address to the school.  I enjoy doing it, as a teacher.  Last year I talked about Katrina.

This year I talked about profanity, including racial slurs.  I used one.  I did not get fired.  I am relieved.

Here is the text:

Good morning.

First, let me apologize if this talk is a little rambling.  At Rev G’s request, I threw this jeremiad together over break between second helpings of turkey and separating two brawling boys.  I’m also going to take a huge risk later, and I’m really worried about it.  So we all have my discomfort to enjoy.

So as a sort of last minute talk, I’m just going to mull over an idea that keeps forcing itself into my thoughts.  It’s about the difference between public space and private space.

At first blush, this seems self-apparent.  The difference between your dorm room and your classroom seems pretty obvious.  You have some measure of privacy in your dorm room or your bedroom at home that obviously doesn’t exist, say, here in Bingham.  The school reinforces this idea by requiring dress codes and prohibiting cell phones in the halls, effectively saying that we expect different conduct in different spaces.

Yet, this is inherently a difficult idea for adolescents, I think.  It’s because you’re egocentric.  Don’t take that the wrong way.  You’re supposed to be egocentric.  It was probably just a few years ago that you realized that you are the star of your own movie.  You write the script, you perform, you weather the critics.  This is part of how you differentiate yourself from your childhood self – that part of you clinging to your mother’s warm, dry hand or hiding behind the mass of your father’s legs.  Your world revolves around you.  Even most altruism is simply someone playing the role of altruist at first.  Maybe it becomes that person’s true identity, maybe not.  But as you define yourselves as human beings, your focus is naturally on yourselves.

Which can sometimes blind you to the fact that you share the planet with other people.

The best example of this inability to recognize the difference between public and private space is profanity.  I don’t have a problem with profanity, per se.  I use it; I don’t blush when I hear it.  But – especially when I added two impressionable young children to my life – I had to come to the realization that my words – once they leave my mouth – belong to everyone who hears them.

Similarly, when you speak in class, for instance, your words belong to the class discussion.  The formulation of ideas that you put into words is now part of the shared experience of the class.  I think we understand that.  The idea of the commons.

But when you walk down the hall and drop an “F-bomb” and the top of your voice that’s also a public space.  Again, I’m not a squeamish prude, but I have come to realize that public spaces belong to all of us.  That includes the person who doesn’t want to hear your creative use of compound profanities.  This isn’t about political correctness – although I’ll touch on that in a minute – but rather about simply sharing the common space of our community with dignity and class. 

Some expletives are unplanned, like the inevitable stubbing of toes, the misplaced hammer blow, the sudden reception of shocking news.  But that’s not what one hears in the halls around here.  Instead, it’s just a reflexive use of profanity, because that’s what you hear and use in your private space and it bleeds over into the commons.

Take two examples of how pervasive profanity has become in the last 15 years or so.  George Carlin had a classic routine about the Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on television.  Now humor and profanity are both transgressive.  They get their kick from the fact you’re not supposed to say that or do that, and in saying a curse word or performing a practical joke, you violate some small rule and that’s what gives life its spice, its frisson.  But overuse that license and you destroy the tension that goes into using profanity or making risqué jokes. 

Three of Carlin’s seven worlds are ubiquitous on basic cable after 10pm every night of the week.  One, let’s call it the “S word” was the topic of a South Park episode a few years ago.  They even had a little counter at the bottom of the screen where every time Cartman said it, it rolled over to a new number.  I think they hit 200 in a 30 minute episode.  The South Park guys were making fun of our squeamishness over profanity, but they also demonstrated that once you overuse a word, it ceases to have any power, subversive or otherwise.  Put another way, what started out as subversive and creative became overkill and boring.

It’s not just out and out profanity either.  I’m going to go ahead and use these next two words as is, no euphemisms, and I apologize to any and all who take offense.  This is the part where I get very uncomfortable.  I want to talk about “bitch” and “nigger”.  There was a school of thought that blacks and women could use those words in such a way as to remove the sting from them.  It was a form of co-optation that allowed them to use a word that for centuries was a verbal form of oppression and abuse and strip it of its ability to gut punch someone. I remember living in LA in the early ‘90s and a friend walking me through an NWA song.  The use of both profanity and racist words had a point.  It was an expression of political rage.  It was searing. 

Later on, Meredith Brooks had a hit single called Bitch.  It is now almost impossible to find an entire rap album without someone using the N-word.  But I would argue that the theory of using a word to strip it of its power ultimately doesn’t work.  Instead, it has simply allowed license for people to use that word.  I know what NWA was trying to do, but 20 years later, I don’t think it has worked.  A lot of time and energy went into making “N-word” the “N-word”, into making it something that was simply not OK to use under any circumstances. 

Hopefully, a middle aged white guy saying it makes you uncomfortable, but when I am in the weight room and the music constantly drops the N word and the F word, that’s a violation of public space.  As a history teacher, I don’t want my country to be a country where it’s OK to call someone that word.  Too much blood was spilled in order to end the idea that some people can label other people.  And if I hear it, I will turn it off.  Because it’s not just a word, it’s a word that was used for centuries to say that some people were better than others.  And this obviously goes for any other slur.  To be clear, as far as I know, Taft students don’t go around calling each other the N-word.  But I’ve heard you call each other “gay”.  It’s the same thing.  But even if we don’t use the words ourselves, if we blast music – out of our dorm window or during warm-ups before practice – that uses slurs – whether sexist, racist or what have you – we are tacitly endorsing their use.

I know that you’re the star of your own movie, but your movie overlaps with everyone else’s movie, too, and there needs to be some basic level of agreement on what theaters show PG and what theaters show R rated movies.  To use another metaphor, if we see someone throwing their garbage out the car window, we understand that they have polluted the common space we all live in.  And while the occasional candy wrapper or stray receipt may fall out of your pocket, don’t make a habit of throwing your entire happy meal on the sidewalk.

This isn’t about thought police, it’s about courtesy.  We live cheek by jowl here at Taft.  Most of you will decide to share your life with someone else, share a home with a family.  Get used to the idea that being part of a community means putting just enough filter on your words so that you don’t make others uncomfortable, and that includes nattering old farts like me, apparently.

Finally, there is another area where the interplay between public and private is very tricky.  And that’s the virtual world.  So much of our life happens on line, and we haven’t yet come up with etiquette for that world.

Some of you know I have a blog.  The only people who read it regularly are my mom and a few of her friends.  Sometimes, I am moved to use profanity, because sometimes profanity is called for.  It’s my blog, after all, and if I want to curse, I can.  Except, my audience apparently consists of not a few 70 year old matrons in the greater Atlanta area, Deirdre Shea and Angel Pan, so I have to tone it down just a bit.  In the end, I have to write as though I was sitting in front of my mom, which means when the s hits the fan it does not do so gratuitously.  And maybe gratuitously is the important filter and finding out what that filter is, well, that’s worth consciously thinking about.

Similarly, social media puts you guys in almost constant contact with each other.  But think about the physical dynamic of being on line.  You are usually isolated somehow.  You are interacting with a screen, not another person.  You lose that filter that naturally occurs when you are next to someone.  I’ve been part of an internet chat group for over 12 years.  It’s a group of people who started out talking about Braves baseball in an ESPN chat room in the early days of the internet, back in the dial-up era.  Now we have our own website and some of us post daily.  I know a little bit about most of them, some of them have met up at games and met as real people.  We have running inside jokes that stretch back almost a decade.

It’s nice.

This summer, we let a whole bunch of new people into the site.  Many of them your age, refugees from some new rules at ESPN’s chat board.  Immediately, flame wars and personal invective started flying.  The rules and norms that the old timers (and the old timers are not all that old, many are in their 20s) had put into place were overwhelmed by the internet culture of casual cruelty.  It took a month before we had straightened out, and we straightened it out, because we all wanted to continue talking about baseball, not calling each other names.

But for most of the internet, there is no referee.  And without the buffer of looking another human being in the eye when you insult them, much of the internet can be caustic and unpleasant.  Not because everyone there is caustic and unpleasant, but because there are usually a few people who would take the commons of the internet and turn it into a swamp.  Rather than share a public space with everyone, they insist on colonizing it into their own personal space and filling it with their own unpleasant baggage.

But remember this, too, the internet never forgets.  If you think you can infect some public corner of the internet with your private bilge, remember that it’s always out there.  Increasingly, companies are checking people’s online personae as part of their hiring process.  Emails are not as private as you think.  The promise of the internet is that it is a commons, a public space, for a new century.  The peril is that before it can become the commons, it will sink to the lowest common denominator.  It will be about insult and profanity and not respecting the common rights of all to use it.

There are endless examples of this inability to differentiate between public and private spaces.  People on their cellphones loudly talking about their colonoscopies.  Dude, I do not need to hear that.  I’m glad the polyp was benign, but c’mon! 

The point is not to censor everything you say or think.  Political correctness simply for the sake of political correctness is both censorship and a power play.

I would just challenge you to recognize that your life plays out in public.  Not all of it, thankfully, but a lot of your life is there for the world to see, whether it is what comes out of your mouth or your stereo speakers or by the deeds you do.  And in seeing you, the world will judge you.  Not because you make Miss Manner’s retreat to her fainting couch, but because ultimately you will be judged by the consideration you show others.