On June 24 I arrived in Michigan at dawn and conked out for a nap. I woke up to a piece of the end of the world. Then I spent the next 48 hours immersed in my own good luck and that of those I love. Then I donated to several guerilla health care funds. Money is not a substitute for liberty, but it is the best I have to offer, because not everyone has luck. Liberty should not depend on luck (or money), but in this country, it does.
About my luck—remarkable good fortune that has little to do with what I “deserve” or “earned”. I went to an extraordinary high school, graduating 33 years ago. There’s lots of places you can learn about “Commie”. There’s a whole-ass documentary about it in fact. Starting in 1972, a few hundred kids at a time (some times as low as 150, never much more than 400) went to a small public alternative high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the classes were small, the teachers and students wanted to be there, and kids had extraordinary control over their own educational fate. The particulars changed a lot between the 70s when it started, the 80s when I was there, the 90s when my brother and sisters graduated, and the 10s and 20s when my nieces attended. It didn’t work for everybody. For some students Community High School was perfect. For others it was simply the least terrible place.
It’s easy to romanticize freedom, self-determination, love of learning, and access to art and music. We had all of those things, but it wasn’t a bully-and-harm-free utopia. Kids overdosed (sometimes fatally), got permanently damaged in drunk driving accidents, and were sexually abused or exploited (sometimes by teachers, frequently by each other). Bad things happened, and specifically I mean some of the boys assaulted their girlfriends, or other girls who they happened upon on vulnerable situations.
But I was one of the lucky ones. That particular piece of my luck has lasted me over three decades becoming joy that shines like one of those giggly-rainbow window decals we could buy at gift shops like Middle Earth and Yellow Brick Road in those same years I was at Commie. The other two high schools in town had orchestras and marching bands. We had a world class jazz program. (I’m not joking. They did tour internationally.) There were approximately two AP classes: Art History, and Calculus. Commie kids could take classes in the community or make them up as we went along. You could get PE credit for skateboarding, or for auditing a professional modern dance studio class. You could PE credit by walking around the block with Elmo Morales’ Run-Walk class, even if you smoked a cigarette the whole time. Language Arts could be Mythology, Cinema, the student newspaper, or the Bible as Literature. The Gym was tiny, the weight room was stinky and sordid—I think. I’m not sure I was ever in the weight room, but I Heard Stuff. There were zero sports teams. I enjoyed that last part.
I had to fight my dad like hell to let me go because he thought all the kids smoking on the front porch and wearing all black were nasty, disreputable, and criminal. My dad was a Chinese immigrant whose value system was more 19th century than 20th (and I’m talking Chinese 19th century, not American 19th century), so he actually thought use of tobacco products was akin to prostitution. Once I got there, I made the most of it. I tried to start a classical chamber orchestra my first year. That didn’t last, so I joined the orchestra at one of the bigger high schools, because you could take any class at the other public high schools you could fit in your schedule. Same went for U of M classes. I tried to take a French class at the University, but there was no one around to tell me which one was a good fit, so I fucked it up and had to quit. I had much better luck the next year when I took a Medieval and Renaissance history class.
I did theater, Model United Nations, and all of the nerdy history and literature classes I could cram into my schedule. I went on the student-fled peace march that seemed to have no purpose but to lie down in the road at the intersection of State and South University Streets. I discovered that math didn’t suck and managed to take three years of math. I taught myself the entire first semester of my junior year of high school because my parents had a thing where they’d lend us out to relatives from time to time, just to see the world. I lived in Taiwan with some of my father’s family that fall. Before I left in August, my teachers assigned some reading, gave me all the materials, including the tests, and I came back and took the exams in January. And they gave me credit for studying Chinese language while I was over there, even though not a single one of them saw me doing it—it was 1987–no zoom classes. I could have cheated. I didn’t. I graduated with a 4.0, a national merit scholarship award, and lots of sweet commendations from my teachers. I did not then, nor have I ever developed much appreciation for jazz but if I ever hear a jazz band play Pomp & Circumstance, I cry buckets.
I didn’t have to do it that way. There were lots of kids who regarded going to class at all, never mind getting good grades, as optional. Up to a point, the teachers left them to it. You could be the kid whose senior year consisted almost entirely of classes at the University (my friend Wendie), or you could be the kid who took an extra year to graduate because they flunked 3 out of 5 classes due to sleeping in and/or being drunk. You could be the kid who failed so thoroughly they got sent back to Huron or Pioneer High School (my “neighborhood” school—which was roughly 4 times farther from my house than Commie). You might or might not fail there too. Kids mostly went to Commie because mainstream high schools (including the kids and teachers there) freaked them out, bullied them, or just sucked. The teachers at Commie mostly loved us (I mean, they also played favorites or ignored red flags sometimes). The teachers (invariably called by their first names—Betsy, Ann, Mike, Ava, Rocky) saved the ones they could, mostly by letting us fuck up and forgiving the ones who were motivated enough to eventually unfuck themselves. That doesn’t work for everyone. There were kids who had severe mental illness and/or drug abuse problems who needed help they couldn’t get at a small, hippie school. For kids with IEPs in the 00s and after, it was a joke.
The kids in my graduating class and adjacent classes (1987-92) went to the Marines, to Harvard, Yale, Washtenaw Community College, Stanford, University of Oregon, the trades, to jobs waiting tables, driving cabs, working security at the 8-Ball Saloon, or making sandwiches at Zingerman’s Deli (next door to the high school). Some attended Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, nursing school, the Naval Academy, Oberlin, Antioch, Eastern Michigan University, the University of Michigan, and art and music conservatories all over the country. Some graduated where they started, some didn’t. Some also ended up dead within a few years, or homeless. Remarkably few seem to have gone to prison though. For a tiny school the fraction of the size of the other high schools in town, Commie did pretty well.
I happened grow up in a town that allowed me that experience. Not everyone wanted it, and by the late 90s, not everyone who wanted it could have it. The school went from having to recruit 8th graders to keep the classes full enough to keep funding to having kids camp out for two weeks to get a spot on the roster. I went to school with kids whose parents had kicked them out or who could barely them keep showered and fed, much less holding a tent camping spot for two weeks to get into high school that didn’t suck. Missing that last spot in line would force them to trade 10 minute passing periods and the choice of having your first class at 8:00 or at 9:00 for whatever weird schedule that started everyone at 7:19 and blatted a bell in your ear every 50 minutes. Community had an open campus, no detention, and no bells (but we did have two of the foulest, unholy piss-soaked fire escape stairwells where people smoked during breaks).
Lest there be any confusion, I was not a particularly carefree kid and high school was not some idyll I thought of as the high point of my life. I enjoyed school, and felt lucky to NOT be at Pioneer, but I was deeply neurotic and frequently lonely, while surrounded by peers I liked and even respected. It would simply have been worse at Pioneer because for me the primary measure of how close I was to not losing my mind at any given moment was how much control I had over my situation. Public education in the United States has historically been about compliance and conformity. Commie allowed me to do what I did well, which happened to be succeeding academically and intellectually, without also stressing my shit out by making me perform mainstream compliance while immersing me in a peer group that would enforce conformity by social intimidation.
Whatever the formula that worked for each of us, the total structure worked well enough to generate a remarkably high ratio, 30+ years later, of pretty reasonable social contributors. My peers include numerous professional educators at all levels from preschool through university, several arts and cultural figures with national name recognition, successful artists in numerous fields, and most importantly, thousands of decent, loving humans who are leading kayak tours, selling flowers, cutting hair, raising kids, rescuing dogs, changing surgical dressings, serving drinks, and just being functional, wholesome primates. Many of us would say Community High School made us who we are. Some definitely say it saved lives because otherwise more of us would have dropped out or turned experimentation with drugs into permanent, destructive self-medication, both of which have adverse sequalae in chronic illness, poor economic stability, and early death. I think that could have been true of at least one of my siblings. The bad fate *did* happen to some anyway. Every reunion there’s a board naming those who have passed. Commie has had *maybe* six total reunions, ever. Everyone who has ever attended goes, every five-ish years since 2002 or so. The board gets bigger each time, but some have been on the board since nearly the beginning.
So—context: Commie and I are almost exactly the same age. The first class started in fall 1972. I “started” in fall ’71, so that first class took their first steps in the halls the same time I took my first steps as a biped. The school and I were teenagers together. As it turns out, Commie and I had another peer who didn’t make it. Roe v. Wade was decided in January 1973, before the first class finished their first year. I was 15 months old. I marched down the aisle to the jazz riffs of Pomp & Circumstances two and half years before George the First appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court (with the active advice and consent of Joe Biden). My first niece was born 3 months before the Bush/Gore election. George the Second appointed Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court. That niece graduated from Commie in 2018, the year Kavanaugh first contaminated the Court. Brett Kavanaugh graduated from his posh east coast prep school in 1983. That year I was a sixth grader learning about Commie by going to see my own future theater company perform Romeo and Juliet. I later became friends with some of the Commie class of 1983. They aren’t sitting on the Supreme Court, but I am confident they aren’t rapists either.
For 50 years an experiment in education has given young people the skill, power, and respect to direct their own education. One of the anchor experiences of my life, and that of thousands of others, who just happened to be raised in a particular Midwest college town, at a particular time, was that of being able to control my own life as much, or even more, than was good for me at a critical developmental phase. I flew across the country to be with people with whom I may share “only” the experience of the last three years of my childhood, which in turn we share with only fifty years’ worth of small graduating classes. On the same day, six religious extremists, two of whom went to the same posh boys’ DC area school, and two of whom are sex offenders, destroyed 49 years of human autonomy for roughly half the United States autonomy.
50 year old me was able to fly across the country because I have a good job, with good benefits, a stable family life, and numerous other structural privileges. I have those things because I have many years of a solid career and excellent education behind me. One of the earliest and most important parts of that education was Commie High, where I learned, among other things, to choose the path that was right for me. The fact I was never trapped in a room with a sex offender is a little more complicated. That did actually happen to girls at parties with Commie boys. But unlike a lot of American high schools there wasn’t a football, basketball, or swim team who the entire school enabled to be gang rapists.
The narrowness of the gap between my path and others has always been visible to me. I was young in time in our national history where, if some of the bad things that happen to girls, and the bad fate that is not in our control had happened to me, I could still have exercised some control over my path. In 1993, after college, I came back to Ann Arbor and worked at Planned Parenthood. I saw people I went to school with pass through the doors of the clinic (for pregnancy related care and otherwise). There has never been a time when I didn’t know what could happen to women and girls who aren’t lucky.
The Commie 50th reunion let me spend a weekend literally and figuratively embracing people whose simple existence makes me smile. I was happy to see a few of my oldest and closest friends, but for me the most joy came with seeing those who I don’t necessarily know well, although there are some I have socialized with periodically. I didn’t need to see them long, or talk with them much, but to know they are there makes me feel better. We all need family not-of-the-blood, and we need more than just the sisters and brothers, but also the neighbor’s brother-in-law who married Aunt Barb, the favorite older second cousin who told gross jokes and fished you out of the river. Commie gave me all of those. I am so very grateful to be able to see people whose fates mingle with mine, and I see that we are getting old, and we are (mostly) okay. And we remember and mark the lives of those who maybe weren’t okay, and who didn’t make it this far. Each one of us had luck. The fortune of being born, and being able to make some choices that were good for us. That made us better, saner, safer, healthier, wiser than we might otherwise have been. And the good or lucky choices we had helped us weather the bad decisions we made.
If Roe v. Wade was a woman, she would be 49 years old. If she had been a Commie student, she would have graduated in the class between me and my brother. And I would have written her name on the “In Memoriam” board a few weeks back. If “just” being able to manage your own secondary school experience can transform so many people, what is the magnitude of being unable to control ones own body? The simple fate of being born with a bat and balls instead of a catcher’s mitt now decreases the gratuitous risk of dying in horrible septic pain from one of the commonest human conditions. Being woman/girl-identified has always increased the risk of being intruded upon against ones will, of being occupied against ones will, and forced to endure loss, pain, danger, death, and permanent curtailment of so much of life’s branching possibility. I happen to have enjoyed some luck of birth and a good high school. Others are born with a rich daddy (Brett Kavanaugh’s dad was a cosmetics lobbyist). I went to school with several women with chronic autoimmune illnesses. One is on the memorial board. A pregnancy, even a well managed, wanted one, could mean more of their names.
For fifty years Community has been teaching people how to choose. And by teaching us to choose, we learn how to fight. For most of my own fifty years I have been steadily fighting to control my own path (I was stubborn as hell well before high school). I got to choose each silly, hard, fascinating step of high school, I chose which college to go to (because Commie helped me to have such choices), I bulled my way through far less successful educational experiences than the halcyon days when Brian and Marilyn let me combine my Social Studies and Latin final papers for both their classes. I’ve had shitty days and whole shitty years when everything felt rotten and miserable, and like the most functional, competent, self-sufficient period of my life was between 16 and 22. It’s not great to be 35 or 40 years old and feeling that way, but it was because I could make my own bloody damn choices and have them stick, even when I was chronically depressed and my brain wasn’t even fully cooked. And half of those years I was at Commie.
Since I left that particular bubble moment of memory and love, I have felt rage ebbs and flows. It is simmering inside me, and also burning out there on the margins of my vision: the fear, the pain, the colossal outrage knowing my children, my nieces and nephlets, the children of my friends and peers, are less safe. When they lack luck, the Court has thrown them to the wolves. If they’re the ones held down in a dark room at party, or too drunk to say no, they may become the names written on the memorial board. At the same time I am holding that little spark of luck and joy from my classmates and teachers. I’m return to blow gently on it, fanning it so I can turn the flame like a dragon’s torch on my enemies. I wish I didn’t have to take it into battle, but thank you my friends for the fuel.
rage. creation - joy 