My father’s work took our family to Nellis Air Force Base/Las Vegas at the end of my junior year in high school. Nobody knew me when I registered for senior classes late in the summer of 1975, so when I signed up for “Rhetoric” as an English class, the teacher, Mr. Harrington, wanted to see my placement test scores. “Bright as hell,” he said, and he signed me up.
It might be hard for readers in 2015 to understand how shocking that was – socially minded adults simply did not use such language casually, in public, in front of women or children. A student who said that to a teacher in either of my previous two high schools would have been called out for inappropriateness (demerited, sent to the principal, at least reprimanded).
For the record, I know the differences between cursing and swearing and profanity, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll call it all “swearing.” Also, although I’m going to refer repeatedly to the so-called “F-bomb,” I’m going to write “Que” instead of “Eff” here – I always hear the full word when someone says “Eff,” and I hope the novelty of “Que” will not necessarily provoke the same response in you. Maybe you don’t care. I do.
So, we did a lot of writing in Rhetoric, and had a lot of class discussion. Frankly, I don’t remember much about the class except that Mr. Harrington was fanatic about how we turned in our papers: They had to be folded lengthwise, with name/date/class period written in a certain formulation. Maybe I remember that because he kept insisting we would have to turn in our college papers that way – and in the little college work I did, no teacher required that.
One day the class discussion was on “realism” in our writing. “Que you!” Mr. Harrington started. “You queing kids need to make your writing more realistic!”
Okay, that was shocking. I had heard the occasional “hell” and “damn” from more or less respectable people, but I had never heard “Que” thrown out like that by anybody who even pretended to be a decent human being.
So, the class discussion was about using whatever language in our writing replicated the real speech we heard around us. Trouble is, as I said, I didn’t hear that language around me. I didn’t say it, my parents didn’t say it, other adults I looked to for models didn’t say it, and when I heard it, it didn’t sound cool or adult to me – it just sounded hateful and ugly. To judge by the contributions of class members, I was in the minority – perhaps even a minority of one.
I dared to raise my hand. “It wouldn’t be realistic for me to write that,” I said. “I don’t say those words. I don’t even want to say those words.”
“Oh, Que, Que, Que, Que, Que!” responded Adrienne Abdo (her real name; she’s highly unlikely to see this, but if she does I want her to know that she is remembered, and why). “That didn’t kill you, did it? Que you!”
Again, I don’t know that it’s possible for readers in 2015 to really understand how I felt in that situation. I didn’t say anything more – I didn’t ask the teacher to ban that language in class, I didn’t tell anybody they were going to hell, I didn’t say it was against my religion, I didn’t say anything more than that it didn’t reflect my reality. The class voted, and I was the only one who voted “no” to incorporating that language into class writing. Everybody else voted “yes.” Even the boy in my seminary class. I don’t remember his name, or I would add it here.
And that’s how my senior English class became the crudest, most vulgar, coarsest period of my life. From teacher on down to the kids who otherwise didn’t much take part in class, “Que” was the class’s favorite word.
If I’d had easy access this morning to The Children’s Friend (why, oh, why, is that the only Church magazine that hasn’t been digitized??), I would have looked for a story from the 1960s to illustrate this post. But I’ll settle for this one from 1997. In that story, a little boy named Brian “had just moved to a new town, and he was anxious to make new friends.” Brian especially liked William … but William often took the Lord’s name in vain. Brian “knew that this was wrong, and he didn’t like to hear William talk that way. Brian remembered the covenant he had made at baptism to always keep Heavenly Father’s commandments and to stand as a witness for Him. I’m going to ask William to quit swearing, he decided.” When Brian did ask, and explained that “Heavenly Father doesn’t like it,” William pondered a moment. “Then he quietly said, ‘I never knew that. No one ever told me that before. I won’t say it anymore if you don’t want me to.’”
I grew up with Church stories like that – you probably did, too: A Latter-day Saint youth stands up for his principles, and his peers respect him so much that they leave the R-rated movie, choose not to drink the beer they’ve taken from somebody’s dad’s fridge, pick up trash in the park rather than break windows in an abandoned house. I don’t recall that such stories ever entered my head in Mr. Harrington’s class, so I can’t claim that I expected everybody to stop swearing in class. I don’t recall feeling at all betrayed by my Church lessons when they didn’t stop the swears, either.
I recalled this experience yesterday when I flipped through the current issues of the Friend and the New Era, something I hardly ever do. The Friend carried a story typical of those I remember from my own childhood: In “Sticks and Stones,”, a boy is unkind to his brother, then thinks better of it, apologizes, and all is well. No lasting harm. Kumbaya.
The New Era, though, carries another kind of story that I don’t remember seeing in the magazines and lessons of my youth – they might have been there, but if so they made no impression on me. In “Losing My New Friends”, a seventh grader decided that she shouldn’t – she couldn’t – watch the movie her new friends were going to see. She does all the Mormony things – asks her mother for advice, suggests an alternative activity to the girls, suggests another alternative activity. Nothing doing. The friends are determined to see the movie, and the girl had to call her mother to be picked up. “I’d been so excited for this day and now it was turning out to be the worst day ever. When I saw my mom pull up, I quickly grabbed my stuff and headed out. As I walked to the car I felt a tear roll down my cheek. I’d just made one of the hardest decisions of my life, but I knew it was the right one.”
I was glad to see that there is at least some effort in this generation to point out that things sometimes don’t turn out like a sappy movie. You can still be hurt, still be left out, still suffer consequences, even when your choice was the right one.
I hadn’t said I wouldn’t use Que in my writing because I was thinking of any specific moral standard – I didn’t use those words in real life, so I saw no reason to use them in my writing to be falsely “realistic.” I didn’t try to change anybody else’s mind. I wasn’t preachy. I didn’t argue with anybody. I just made the simple statement that I didn’t and wouldn’t use those words.
My experience in 1975-76 was far more like the current New Era story where there were real social consequences for my choice – it was absolutely nothing like the typical sweet story where friends learn to admire you and decide they want to be like you.
Swearing became a part of my everyday experience. And there was more.
For reasons too boring to explain, I had been enrolled in a school other than the one that served my neighborhood. It was just under two miles from my home, and I wasn’t eligible for any school bus because I was out-of-area. So I walked. I caught a ride to school in the morning with someone in my seminary class, but I always walked home, alone. That was quite a walk to make in the afternoon, in the Las Vegas heat and sun, but I did it because there was nothing else to be done.
Starting the afternoon of Mr. Harrington’s “Que you!” lesson, I didn’t make that walk alone, though. I was followed by a car full of high school boys, driving very slowly to parallel my walk. “Hey! Do you Que? You wanna Que? Que you, you Que-er!” When they had to move ahead because of following traffic, they circled the block, came up on me from behind, and continued. “You like to Que? I’ll Que you!” All the way from Pennwood to Charleston, where they finally turned in another direction and let me walk the last half mile in peace.
They followed me like that virtually every school day until April. I never reacted, never even showed a sign that I heard them – but of course I did. Every word, every day. I never told anybody, at home or at school – I’d been subjected to enough bullying by that point to know that there was nothing my parents could do, and that nobody else would even try.
So I’m glad to see that magazines now, and perhaps lessons, occasionally have somewhat more realistic stories than I recall from my own youth. The next step, though, is to model how children and young people can deal with the lingering consequences of expressing or living their beliefs. The New Era story ends with, “I felt good knowing I had followed the promptings of the Holy Ghost. I know that I am a much stronger girl because I chose not to go.” That isn’t really enough, though, is it?
But it really is enough, to know that you did the right thing. I had a similar experience in high school. I was not yet baptized, because my father would not give consent, & after my birthday, when I did not need consent & was baptized, I was kicked out of the house. I was the “only” Mormon in a very liberal high school. I had two friends that were a Baptist & a Jehovah’s Witness, but mostly, we stood alone. Four decades later, I have no problem standing alone; I don’t enjoy it, but I can do it without blinking an eye, if I know I am standing for the right. I have come to appreciate that as a positive quality, hard-won on the field of adolescent battle.
But it still hurts–a lot. Frequently, being told to ignore it and be strong hurts even more, at least at the time.
I didn’t go through either of these traumas, but I certainly had my own. Part of the particular challenge of being young is that we lack both experience and perspective. Those help a lot. But it STILL hurts.
I know I’m not very good at it, but I believe that part of mourning with those that mourn is admitting how hard it is and how much it can hurt. There is a temptation to offer a ‘quick fix’ to other people’s problems, and then to try to forget the ones we can’t fix. But there is a lot of value in agreeing that a situation is really hard, that I don’t judge the sufferer for not having a solution, since I don’t have one either, and that there is no way that they deserve such suffering.
And we also need stories that honestly admit that at least in the short term of mortal life, goodness is not always rewarded, and the price of discipleship can be high.
The printed story in a magazine comes to an end, and perhaps the warm and fuzzy “I did what was right” is enough of a payoff in a literary sense.
But all these “based on a true story” stories come from lives that didn’t end with the printing of the magazine. That seventh-grade girl had to go back to school on Monday with the same girls she had just dumped in order to do what she believed was right. Was the Saturday event forgotten, and did her friends act like nothing had happened? Did they tease her? shun her? apologize to her? Any of these aftermaths are possible — some more likely than others — and it’s too much to expect a child (even an adult, I think) to be long sustained solely by the knowledge that she had done right and was “stronger,” without also suggesting some strategies for coping with the possibly negative consequences of having done the right thing. If you don’t, then the child’s instinct to do right can easily be worn down. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that if the social consequences for having left her friends that day are severe enough (in her child’s mind, at least), she will NOT obey her better nature next time, but will go to the movie, have the drink, let the boy take liberties, whatever.
And we also need stories that honestly admit that at least in the short term of mortal life, goodness is not always rewarded, and the price of discipleship can be high.
Exactly. And modeling some ways to cope with that reality is more apt to encourage right behavior in future than is suggesting that there are no long term negative consequences, or that somehow the memory that you once did something right is enough to help you breeze through the rocky times to come.
On a related note this reminds me of that excellent BYU classic “Measure of a Man” (the link is not the full movie, but perhaps the best part). Also there is the classic LDS movie “The Award“. I grew up watching movies like that, but somehow I always knew that it would never be that easy and things wouldn’t always work out like that.
Many of my teenaged traumas actually occurred at church, where I had experiences that conveyed the idea that it is perfectly acceptable to ignore or even blame the quiet one who always comes, sits quietly, and knows the answers, while you plan special activities to draw the less active or troubled kids.
Now as an adult I can look back on all of those episodes and well-meaning, fallible people doing and saying really stupid and hurtful things. I have more sympathy for them now that I have had time to say hurtful and stupid things even though I meant well. But it certainly would have helped me at the time if I had felt free to at least discuss these incidents with my parents or someone else without feeling either that I was criticizing people in authority, or that it was very shameful because I had deserved it.
Children and Youth need mentors who recognize these sorts of experiences.
Wow, I know that the Que word has become virtually de rigueur today, but that story’s still shocking (at least, to me). While I remember a teacher using an obscenity (not the Que word but very close) in 1973, and being shocked to hear it, I wonder if it’s different if you’re a girl or a boy. I also wonder if part of the reaction to hearing it was feeling, afterwards, the disrespect to you when the class continued to use it as something of a verbal bludgeon. And that walk home: How could anyone not feel threatened! Sorry that happened, Ardis. Things do tend to get better, but the memories remain potent.
I really don’t understand high school boys. Except for the fact that it happened, it’s unimaginable that a group of boys would harass a girl in crude, specific, and threatening terms for months, just for not wanting to use an expletive in class.
I really don’t understand high school girls, either. Except for the fact that it apparently happened (*names have been changed), I can’t imagine telling my friends “that movie seems a bit gory (or whatever) for me — want to watch something else?” and having them encourage me to lie to my parents, ask if I was too good for them, or call me a loser. I also can’t imagine feeling devastated or betrayed when they chose to see the movie they wanted anyways, or writing a magazine article about how I had lost my friends — a movie only lasts two hours or so, and there are plenty of other opportunities to have fun with friends.
I didn’t know I was old enough for teenagers to be mystifying, but I guess I am. I guess part of the trouble with modeling how to deal with lingering consequences is that they can be so unexpected. I mean, “it lasted until April and I never gave any sign that I heard them” is simultaneously admirable and horrifying — I really want someone with a time machine to change the past so you have better options — but who would have guessed that you’d have to deal with that in the first place? Similarly, I’d love a follow-up article about how the cheerleader in the New Era started hanging out with the drama crowd, where people were up to all manner of inappropriate things, but where they also liked her as she is, and weren’t bothered if she skipped a movie — but who would have guessed that she’d lose her friends (for at least long enough to write about it) over missing one movie? With consequences so unpredictable, I don’t know if there’s any more generally applicable advice that could be given other than “you can deal with it somehow; just do your best.”
As an aside, I guess the other thing I don’t understand is your teacher’s notion of rhetoric. I remember ethos, pathos, and logos, and I’ve heard “Que” (or the word it stands for) used to great effect in two of those categories, for certain audiences (notably, though, not for the sort of audiences my high school teachers expected me to write for). Still, I wouldn’t describe that word as necessary for “realism” — I thought your description of your harassers was plenty realistic, despite the use of a fanciful substitute for what they actually said.
Thanks for sharing this Ardis. Powerful what you endured on that long walk home every day. I hate the que word, too. It’s not part of my vocabulary, but damn and hell can be when I’m “over the top” angry, still. Still, I keep working on refining my speech, since I know it reflects my own refinement in so many ways. Keep writing!
Others have made far more insightful comments than I can offer at this time, so I’ll go with the simple: thank you for sharing and for making me think.
Thank you for sharing your story and for using “que” instead of a more realistic alternative! I am sorry that you had to endure such terrible harassment for most of the school year. Even worse that it was sparked by a foolish, irresponsible teacher.
I’ve been working on a person inventory and writing autobiographical stories. I was grateful, but surprised to realize that, at a very young age, my parents empowered me to find solutions to my problems. I too had situations where my “good choices” had very negative results. Yet, there was always something I could do to improve (not necessarily fix) the situation. I recall reading stories like the ones you described in The Friend and discussing what we would have done if things hadn’t worked out so smoothly.
I hope that I can teach my children that there is always something positive that can be done in the face of a negative situation. Even if it is simply talking about it so that we are not alone in our pain. If we open our mouths and speak the truth, it won’t resolve every problem, but it may help us find another path or connection that will bless our lives.
Thank you for speaking the truth Ardis!
Going to high school in Ogden, Utah, where 70% of the students also attended seminary, the Que word was heard occasionally, but never spoken by a teacher. It was only after I got through college (Weber State) and got involved more deeply in the working world, that it became something of a commonality. I cringe when I think of what those boys did, bullying you that way, but I also know that as a high school boy, it was awful easy to jump on that bus in a minor way. So I know I have been guilty of less egregious offenses, but offenses nonetheless. Sad.
In my adult life, I have been lucky. Only rarely have I felt that my religion made me an outsider, but at times it did. Most people have been fairly respectful, including some coworkers who have deliberately tried to limit their swearing because they knew I was around. Chalk some of that up to white male privilege, I guess, but the consequences of living my standards have not been as painful as yours or others. So sorry to hear about this.
Just curious, though, was Donald Trump one of those high school bullies? He certainly doesn’t seem to have given up any of those attitudes and behavior. If he said things at the school where I work like he has said to Megan Kelly or Carly Fiorina, he’d be expelled. [Feel free to edit out this last paragraph if you think it is too political}.
When I was a sophomore at Provo High School (almost five decades ago) there was a Chinese exchange student in my gym class named Henry Fok. The teachers called us all by our last names, so when Henry fell on his face while jogging around the practice field the first week of class, one of the teachers yelled “FOK” in a loud voice to make sure he was ok. It caused the entire girls gym class on the next field to suffer whiplash. They would have all passed out if he’d really said the “Que” word. (It also made the teachers decide that “Fok” in English actually meant “Running Deer” and they called him that the rest of the year.)
And, there was another coach that the wrestling team (and then the rest of the school) called “Osh” because of his habit of saying “Ah, sh” (and stopping there) when something went wrong.
Seriously, though, your point is a good one, Ardis. The confidence that one has made the right choice doesn’t necessarily make everything turn out happily ever after. The “New Era-ready” story ends, but real life goes on and there are real-life consequences, not always comfortable. Even for adults.
I loved LauraN’s comment (#2)
“I know I’m not very good at it, but I believe that part of mourning with those that mourn is admitting how hard it is and how much it can hurt. There is a temptation to offer a ‘quick fix’ to other people’s problems, and then to try to forget the ones we can’t fix. But there is a lot of value in agreeing that a situation is really hard, that I don’t judge the sufferer for not having a solution, since I don’t have one either, and that there is no way that they deserve such suffering.”
I think that is so important. There are plenty of times I just want someone to say, “That’s hard” without trying to fix it.
I also agree with your comment in #3, Ardis,
“…without also suggesting some strategies for coping with the possibly negative consequences of having done the right thing. If you don’t, then the child’s instinct to do right can easily be worn down.”
Maybe it is too much to expect a teenager to write those suggestions, but it does seem the discussion would be richer with them.
I’m really old, so “que” was not used when I was in high school, at least not in my small town in British Columbia, Canada. Even though there weren’t many Mormons in town, no one harassed us for our beliefs. Everyone else was pretty decent, too, probably attending their own churches every Sunday. I do have a couple of sort of “doing the right thing” stories, though.
When I was living in Hawaii I attended a company Christmas party at which there was a liberal amount of alcohol served. One woman was teasing me about not drinking, and one of my co workers (also a friend), who was a really heavy drinker, turned to her and said, “Hey, she has standards; let her keep them.”
Another time. I was at a party at a friend’s home. I was dancing with this guy and he asked if he could freshen my drink for me. I said sure and he asked what I was drinking. I told him 7 Up; he asked 7 Up and what. I told him just plain 7 Up. He looked at my strangely and brought me back my straight 7 Up. I later learned that he had asked the hostess about me and she had told him that I was a Mormon and didn’t drink. My friends all accepted that fact and didn’t bug me about it.
Fast forward a few years. I was working for a company here in Salt Lake where most of my co workers were not LDS. They sometimes liked to go out after work to a club somewhere, like what I think was called the “Room at the Top” at the Hilton, and I would at times go with them. Another LDS girl in the office was never invited. One day, one of the “party” gals said to me, “I want you to know how much we appreciate you. When we go out after work, we invite you (and not the other girl) because we know you accept us as we are, yet will still maintain your standards.” Now there are some who will say that to “avoid the very appearance of evil” I should not have gone with them at all. But they were nice people and I enjoyed their company. And not one of them ever tried to get me to lower my standards. They accepted me just as much as I accepted them.
I’m glad I never had your high school experiences, Ardis.
I know that I was sheltered growing up. The only time I even heard a swear word was when my mom, who had grown up with a dad who was a truck farmer and owned a small orchard, picked cherries and apricots, and then strawberries with me to teach me how to be efficient and honest. One morning as she stood straitened up with her crate of strawberries she stubbed her toe and went down spilling the strawberries all over. She sat there in that strawberry patch and said “Damn.” I thought the world was coming to an end.
In high school I ran around with the student leaders and a lot of the popular kids were my friends. Once in awhile I heard damn or hell, but not often. I didn’t hear the Que word until a long time after I was married. I cannot begin to understand what you went through to have a teacher encourage such foul language as if it were a normal and accepted part of speech. I’m so very sorry.
My friends in high school knew my standards and just didn’t bother to invite me to most social events. They knew I wouldn’t approve of the smoking, drinking, swearing, rating, etc. I know because they told me so once when they were discussing a party that I hadn’t heard of.
It was nice to feel respected, but at the same time I felt very neglected. My deep connections with friends were few and far between.
For me, it would be good to add to the end of the New Era story whatever happened after that. Did she join an extracurricular? Did age dug into her school work? Get an after school job? Read more? How did she fill the hole?
Ugh. I’m mobile. Thought I caught the typos.
This blog post refers to foul language, which I certainly don’t like, but it isn’t about foul language. It also refers to the difficulties of adolescence, which certainly is rough, but it’s not about that either. It is about the narrative we tell ourselves and the young people around us.
Yes, good will triumph over evil, but please, don’t hold your breath. God has a plan for you, but he may not explain it until after your mortal life is over, so try not to whine.
Ardis did everything she could to keep the commandments as a young person, and then wounds up in a ward that accused her of the sins of ‘not following the script’ and ‘ruining our even numbers’ when she couldn’t produce a spouse on cue.
Although the church teaches that rearing her own children is the highest station a woman can aspire to, I often felt that the non-Mormon men in my neighborhood were more respectful of me as a stay at home mom than the Mormon men at church.
Neither situation is what the church magazines of our youth told us to expect. Fortunately, we both read a lot of other stuff, so we weren’t caught completely off guard.
But there is still the danger that our constant stories of how everything works out when you do what is right will discourage young people when it doesn’t happen to them, or that we will terribly misjudge people because we assume that health, wealth, etc. will automatically follow good choices.
Since I am a story-teller, I will tell one here. It has a happy ending, but it still shows the risk.
Years ago, a member of the bishopric approached me at church, very concerned. A sister had just asked to be released from her calling as she wouldn’t be attending church any more. I was her visiting teacher, and he asked if I could find out what was going on in her life.
My companion and I had an appointment with her for the next day, so we carefully didn’t give her the opportunity to cancel it. We prayed for guidance before going in. She greeted us and asked, “How are you?” I opened my mouth and started telling her about the troubles in my life. I didn’t have a bad life, but I had kids, a husband, a house, a body. I had troubles. My companion stared, open mouthed, because she had never before seen me complain like this. To be honest, I was stunned as well.
When I finished, my companion started listing all of her troubles. She had never done that before either.
When she finished, the sister we were visiting said, “I’ve always thought that if you kept all of the commandments and were a good person, you wouldn’t have any troubles. But since you are both wonderful people, and you still have problems, I will dare to tell you mine.”
I admit that I couldn’t make much sense of her problems. They seemed disjointed and unconnected to my. But my much older companion said, “Dear, if I were your age, and I felt like that, I would call my doctor, and I would say it was an emergency.”
This sister looked stunned, and then nodded. She was on the phone with her doctor as we left.
The next Sunday, she grabbed me and said, “Thank you so much. The doctor found all my hormones out of whack. She said the medication would take three weeks to work, but I already feel SO much better.”
So this little story has a happy ending. But how did this poor woman get the idea that ‘good people’ did not have problems? And what would have happened to her if I had managed to ignore the prompting to spill my guts when I did?
We need to make sure that our narratives include the fact that sometimes you stand up for what is right, and you stand alone. Sometimes even the people who were supposed to be on your side will mock you. And you still must find a way to stay strong.
Kind of a general response and also one for Mike R, who commented above: Yes, it does happen, and probably a lot. Primary school and High School children really do do this sort of thing. They can be unbearably cruel, and that includes the ones who seem quite normal and nice generally – not just the obvious bullies. Children (and adults, actually) get caught up in trends; especially in school, children are desperate to fit in, to find a place, any place. In order to get it or keep it, they’ll go along with all sorts of things, including bullying.
A misheard word, in response to a crude, unkind question early in high school, became a mantra I was bullied with for several years, including by people who were otherwise nice (at large) or who didn’t know me and weren’t interested in me, except for the novelty of what I’d apparently said. No one ever actually asked me genuinely what I’d said, or spoke out against the silly and unkind question that started it. One girl who’d originally been a sort of friend, and heard the exchange, helped spread the rumour and never defended me… I asked her a few years later why she’d done that, when she knew what I’d actually said, and she was a little bit abashed. She said she wasn’t really sure, but she was just trying to fit in – and I was amazed that she hadn’t even considered how damaging and hurtful it could be for me.
I also cringed when I read each of the episodes the author relates; because they’re awful and so cringe-worthy, and because it’s exactly the sort of thing that children – and in this instance, an adult – actually do. Why didn’t she tell people about it? Because, as she says, she’d learnt from experience that likely nothing would change. That’s both true, and part of what happens in the mindset of someone who’s experienced this behaviour before, even if it’s not the whole truth. You learn that you’re not powerful enough to stop it, that it just goes on if people choose to do it, and that adults will be well-meaning, but either make it worse through confrontation or be powerless themselves to help you. I told my dad about the above situation, quite a while after it began, and he commiserated with me, but that was it. There are now programs in schools (at least here in Australia) to prevent this being the story, thankfully.
It’s late, yet here I am re-reading this post and the comments and I find myself drawn to the title of this post, which seems pulled from the hymn “Do What Is Right.” The first line of the chorus states: “Do what is right; let the consequence follow.” I guess I’ve always read the word let in terms of the modern definition, which Webster’s shows as “to cause to”. Interestingly, though, the first definition of let Webster’s references is the “archaic” one that defines let as: “hinder” or “prevent”. Since the text for this hymn was written in 1857, I’m now wondering if I’ve been interpreting that line incorrectly all these years.
As I’ve read the comments, I’ve noted instances of making the right choice “causing” the consequences to turn out for the best (or, at the very least, the better). But the next line states: “Battle for freedom in spirit and might.” Why would we have to “battle for freedom” unless the consequences for doing the right are not always so rosy and pleasant as we would wish. I’ve encountered plenty of personal instances when standing up for what is right put me in a battle–sometimes with the people I love (like the time I received direct, personal revelation for the direction of my life in the Celestial Room of a temple and, after sharing same with loved ones, was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about because my “inspiration” didn’t match with theirs).
What do you do in that situation? The chorus’ next line reads: “And with stout hearts look ye forth till tomorrow.” But what if you’re struggling to keep your heart stout in the face of your consequences? What if you don’t want to look forth to the next day and the next one after that and so on? Sometimes, the answer is to cut yourself off for a period of time and go it alone (at least alone from the loved ones; not Father). Sometimes, as has been expressed by Ardis and some of the comments that have followed, doing what is right doesn’t produce the wonderful peaches and cream, bed of roses consequences the primary and YM/YW stories told us to expect. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to hide the tough consequences our good choices might “hinder” but don’t “prevent.”
I don’t know. It’s later than it was when I started writing this and maybe I’m becoming punchy. Maybe, however, I’m also thinking about how we were recently in Utah and the night before we were to drop our son off at the MTC our house was broken into. At the same time, however, the person who was taking care of our home remembered to turn on the house alarm before leaving and its going off stopped the thieves from taking more than a watch, which, once identified, placed them in our home and sent them to jail. “God will protect you; then do what is right!” Sometimes the protection comes in … interesting ways; ways we can’t immediately identify. Sometimes I guess we can feel as though He isn’t protecting us at all. Still, however, I really have come to believe that He does protect us; maybe just not in the way we always think He should, but He’s there. We just have to find Him in the details.
I’ve heard it said that the Great and Spacious Building runs on mean girl power.
I got bullied fairly regularly as a middle school kid, mostly because I was nerdy and slight of build. (I stood 6′ and weighed 130 pounds when I entered college.) The Church and my standards had not much to do with it, so I couldn’t even console myself with the warm glow of having done the right thing.
No deep insights on how to handle it. It did leave me perhaps more sympathetic than I should be to the idea of kicking the bullies the Que out of school early on so the other kids can have a decent environment in which to learn.
Relatively recently, I finished reading The Boys Who Challenged Hitler, which is about how the Danish resistance was started, a couple of years into the war, basically by a bunch of ninth-graders. After the boys were arrested and sent to prison, the rest of the country was in essence shamed into starting their own resistance efforts.
The part that seems both eerie and relevant to me, though, is the part where it talks about how the boys ended up. I always assumed, when I was a kid, that resistance fighters and Jew-hiders lived Happily Ever After once the war was over. But a lot of these guys had troubled lives after the war. They had trouble with following authority (if you can imagine). A couple developed mental illnesses; many had trouble holding down jobs. The one who seemed to have done the best– though, since the book was based on interviews with him, I surely don’t have a complete picture– had spent his adult life as a professional artist, and famously started a lending library of paintings from the basement of a building in Copenhagen.
As I was reading it, I remembered another book I’d skimmed, a dual biography of two women in an iconic photograph from the Civil Rights Era. I just looked it up– thank you, internet!– it’s called Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. I didn’t finish the book, but of what I read, the part that most surprised me was that Elizabeth– the black young woman in the picture– spent much of her adult life plagued by mental illness.
Sorry if I seem a bit over-focused on mental illness. It runs in my family, and a lot of what I do with my not-paid-labor time is focused on not letting my life experiences tip me that way. Life experiences that included being kicked out of a seminary class because– I was told, and I can’t imagine someone making this up– that the other students didn’t like me. I was one of maybe three kids there who actually liked the class, and I didn’t take any pains to hide it (naive, I suppose).
Most of my “stand up for for right” moments, and all of them that I can think of at the moment, involved either immediate family members (“But saying ‘que you’ is more authentic!” “Not in our family it isn’t!”) or fellow church members who thought of themselves as faithful, but me as fanatical (“Not wanting to ride in a car alone with a married man is too Mormon to be normal”– to which I will only sometimes explain my real reasons, which have far less to do with church counsel than personal experiences. But I am deeply thankful that this year’s RS manual includes that particular specific recommendation. I don’t really care if other people follow it; I just care whether they’re so annoyed that I want to follow it that they make subtle and not-so-subltle digs at me on a regular basis, just to let me know where they think I stand.)
What I’m trying to say is that I think the danger is not just that you will be troubled by such experiences, but that for certain people, those troubles tip them right into mental illness. I think that this is just as much of a danger as was losing digits or even limbs to the cold was for the early pioneers, and just as they didn’t always have the medical knowledge or physical ability to prevent such problems, there were things they could do, and there are things we can do.
Part of what I do is write poetry. I am pretty open about telling people that I tend to only write poetry once I’m at the “either hurt myself or write poetry” decision point; since I’ve decided hurting myself is not a thing I will ever do, poetry it is, every time. Most people laugh when they hear this. Maybe they think I’m using hyperbole, or even metaphor. Folks, these are neither hyperbole nor metaphor, but an actual description of what I actually need and use to keep myself from needing professional mental health services. I feel every bit as led about using poetry this way as I suppose Amanda Smith did in using the materials available to her to heal her son’s wounds after the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Between that and the fact that Knud Pederson (the Danish man I mentioned earlier) seemed to find healing though visual arts, I am personally convinced that the making of art is seriously undervalued as a healing medium.
I remember starting (though I did not finish) the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which follows– among others– the story of a young man who had had both hands blown off in an accident at sea, who was uncertain if his former girlfriend could handle his new lack-of-capability, even though (it was obvious– the actor really was a double amputee) he was impressively handy with his hooks and other prosthetics. As I watched and was impressed, I had a very strong feeling that in today’s world, there are just as many amputees-of-the-soul as there were guys without hands back in those pre-OSHA days– that we are all, basically, walking wounded.
Anyway. Wounds happen. Saying they don’t doesn’t make them not. Some people are spared the wound; others figure out a workaround; others may spend their whole lives in pain which is redoubled by the fact that many people around them judge the pain as their fault because they haven’t yet found healing.
Like I haven’t commented enough– and apologies if this is too much of a threadjack– I remember reading that David Small, a (within the world of children’s picture books) famous author and illustrator, said that he became a children’s book creator because his only other option was to become a serial killer. THAT one makes me laugh, even when I read (and believe, because I’d read a bit of his autobiography) his reassurance that he is completely serious about that.
Art. Even if it can’t completely mend what Life breaks, it can be pretty remarkable in and of itself.
S.,
The instructions about married men and women not riding alone with each other (you know what I mean) makes me think of a story told by Carlford Broderick.
As a very young elders’ quorum president in a small branch in Georgia, he received instructions that he was not to drive alone with any sister not his wife to an upcoming district conference leadership session. This was awkward, since his relief society president needed a ride, and since he was around 30 and she was in her 60s, he thought the requirement a bit silly. He found a solution that more or less obeyed the spirit of the instruction, but with much grumbling.
The presiding authority at the conference was none other than a certain Elder Spencer W. Kimball. After his talk, Elder Kimball threw open the meeting for questions. Being young, brash, and stupid, Brother Broderick asked why the Church didn’t trust its local leaders enough to let them make reasonable travel arrangements.
As Brother Broderick tells the story, Elder Kimball kind of looked at him mildly for a moment, then asked whether Brother Broderick thought that the Brethren just sat around in Salt Lake City dreaming these things up. Brother Broderick kind of hemmed and hawed and said, more or less, “Yeah.” Elder Kimball replied: “Oh, no. We came up with this rule after we lost some bishops and Relief Society presidents.”
Brother Broderick, a recent and idealistic convert at the time, dropped his jaw and then said, “In the Church?!!”
Elder Kimball just smiled sadly and asked for the next question.