My father was born in 1944. This date was due, in part, to my grandfather's military service during World War II. My older brother was born in 1972. This was, at least partially, thanks to the fact that my father had recently learned that he would not have to go to Vietnam. I was born a few years later. My birthdate meant that my elementary school years would be marked by a different sort of war: one declared on drugs. It was a strange war and the US government worked to incorporate young children in the fight. Through DARE education we learned that drugs were evil and that one puff of marijuana would lead to addiction, crime, and worse. The teachers even told us that we should immediately call the police should anyone in our family be using drugs. The lessons were taught with such seriousness, sobriety, and suspicion that the contrast with the colorful, involving, and interesting classes on history, math, and language was noticeable. The general feeling was that drugs were so horrible that we should flee screaming from any hint of the scourge, least we join the ranks of the dispossessed who haunted our streets and consumed the country’s wholesomeness from within.
This air, naturally, made drugs a subject of curiosity for younger children. Why were adults so frightened? In adolescents, whose notion of identity often comes coupled with some form of challenging what one is taught through experience, this curiosity transformed into experimentation. Having an older brother meant that it did not take long for me to be confronted with the possibility of calling 911 when I found a pipe and marijuana under his bed. Fortunately, something about the DARE curriculum had made me doubt and I did not go for the phone. Questioning lessons was likely something that already had been growing inside me at that time, but in my memory this moment was an important step towards independent thought. It was a wrung on the ladder to who I have become. While indeed it would be an exaggeration to draw a line between the Nazis and my birth condemning me to DARE education, it is also too much to argue that thanks to DARE education I became a lover of literature. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that doubting DARE helped me to think critically.
Realizing that what we had been taught about drugs had both a grain of truth and a rhetoric of paranoia made the questioning of all that I was taught a requirement. What other truths had spurred language couched in indoctrination? The lessons we learned seemed focused on influencing identity through patriotism, religion, and the medicalization of sex. While I feel fortunate that the district at least provided reproductive education, I couldn’t help but wonder about the white-robed, latex-gloved language that was used. Where was love? Even today I wonder if the fact that pornography is one of the best ways to make money on the internet was not at least somewhat born in the DAREification of one of life’s greatest beauties. These questions made attractive those voices that explored their own doubts. It did not take long for this to mean reading Kerouac, Burroughs, Huxley, Kesey, Ginsburg, Wolfe, Fisher, Thompson, Castaneda, and many others from the cannon of fringe literature that slowly moved from being revolutionary in my parents’ days to required reading by the time I was old enough for their words to mean something.
Reading these authors included a constellation of music, art, and philosophy that, unsurprisingly, made a trip to the West Coast attractive. However, although I didn’t put these thoughts into words at the time, this adventure was about growing an identity through experience and a brief visit to the country’s other side was not going to be enough; as a result I stayed four years and finished an undergraduate degree. Also predictably: it was in literature. In literature I found centuries of voices that questioned. They asked while many of those around seemed comfortable to accept. Authors like these also sought language to communicate their exploration. This meant creating new dialogic space that, through colorful contrast, brought the dry and clichéd tone of the status quo into relief. Once one has felt this divergence it is impossible not to detect it flowing through all of life. The alternative becomes attractive; difference forms a way of life.
Recently research turned me back towards Kerouac and soon I hope to publish an article about how Mexican symbolism became central in one of his more understudied novels. Returning to a novel I had enjoyed years ago led to two other books that I had never read previously. The first was Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers which tells the wilting of sixties optimism and the uncertainties of the new world that was the hard-drug milieu of the 1970s. Naturally intersecting with this was the nonfiction story of Bruce Porter’s Blow which explains how Colombian cocaine became the backdrop of our society in the 1980s. The latter was not written nearly as well as the former, but the fact Blow was turned into a successful film is testament to the amazing story it tells and makes it worthwhile reading. It was the reading of these two books and thinking about the past which brought me to writing this post.
This air, naturally, made drugs a subject of curiosity for younger children. Why were adults so frightened? In adolescents, whose notion of identity often comes coupled with some form of challenging what one is taught through experience, this curiosity transformed into experimentation. Having an older brother meant that it did not take long for me to be confronted with the possibility of calling 911 when I found a pipe and marijuana under his bed. Fortunately, something about the DARE curriculum had made me doubt and I did not go for the phone. Questioning lessons was likely something that already had been growing inside me at that time, but in my memory this moment was an important step towards independent thought. It was a wrung on the ladder to who I have become. While indeed it would be an exaggeration to draw a line between the Nazis and my birth condemning me to DARE education, it is also too much to argue that thanks to DARE education I became a lover of literature. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that doubting DARE helped me to think critically.
Realizing that what we had been taught about drugs had both a grain of truth and a rhetoric of paranoia made the questioning of all that I was taught a requirement. What other truths had spurred language couched in indoctrination? The lessons we learned seemed focused on influencing identity through patriotism, religion, and the medicalization of sex. While I feel fortunate that the district at least provided reproductive education, I couldn’t help but wonder about the white-robed, latex-gloved language that was used. Where was love? Even today I wonder if the fact that pornography is one of the best ways to make money on the internet was not at least somewhat born in the DAREification of one of life’s greatest beauties. These questions made attractive those voices that explored their own doubts. It did not take long for this to mean reading Kerouac, Burroughs, Huxley, Kesey, Ginsburg, Wolfe, Fisher, Thompson, Castaneda, and many others from the cannon of fringe literature that slowly moved from being revolutionary in my parents’ days to required reading by the time I was old enough for their words to mean something.
Reading these authors included a constellation of music, art, and philosophy that, unsurprisingly, made a trip to the West Coast attractive. However, although I didn’t put these thoughts into words at the time, this adventure was about growing an identity through experience and a brief visit to the country’s other side was not going to be enough; as a result I stayed four years and finished an undergraduate degree. Also predictably: it was in literature. In literature I found centuries of voices that questioned. They asked while many of those around seemed comfortable to accept. Authors like these also sought language to communicate their exploration. This meant creating new dialogic space that, through colorful contrast, brought the dry and clichéd tone of the status quo into relief. Once one has felt this divergence it is impossible not to detect it flowing through all of life. The alternative becomes attractive; difference forms a way of life.
Recently research turned me back towards Kerouac and soon I hope to publish an article about how Mexican symbolism became central in one of his more understudied novels. Returning to a novel I had enjoyed years ago led to two other books that I had never read previously. The first was Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers which tells the wilting of sixties optimism and the uncertainties of the new world that was the hard-drug milieu of the 1970s. Naturally intersecting with this was the nonfiction story of Bruce Porter’s Blow which explains how Colombian cocaine became the backdrop of our society in the 1980s. The latter was not written nearly as well as the former, but the fact Blow was turned into a successful film is testament to the amazing story it tells and makes it worthwhile reading. It was the reading of these two books and thinking about the past which brought me to writing this post.
