Misfit Musings
Scripturient Fragments in an Online Jar
Dick and Jane on Crack - Introduction
"All I really needed to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK." ~ Robert Fulghum
For those adults who wax nostalgic about grade school and the "days of youth long gone," there are as many (I suspect considerably more, in fact) who can readily acknowledge that their formative years were a marathon in survival at best, and at the least nothing over which to long for wistfully or otherwise yearn. Whenever I drive past my elementary school I am overcome with visceral feels that I could frame as nostalgia, but which my more educated self understands to be the very real impacts of decades-old trauma. Invariably, I breathe deep and recall that yes, here is the place where many of the objectively worst years of my life transpired. Ah, childhood.
Looking back on my own experiences in grade school, and childhood overall, my remaining question is, "who is more harmful? The bully, or the bully who bullies the bully?" It is a question that is wholly applicable to all the spheres of adulthood, I have come to find. In systems and people alike.
They say it's easier to nurture healthy children than it is to repair damaged adults. All the evidence more than demonstrates this to be true, although as with most simple tenets, it seems it's very often easier said than done. Because damage begets damage, whether we want it to or not and despite the purest intentions. Either way, as Piggy sagely concluded in Golding's Lord of the Flies, "we just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do."
Dick and Jane on Crack was written to honor the timeless resilience of children, and the underestimated power of "monkey see monkey do" in childhood development specifically, and human nature generally. Here's to all of us for surviving, one way or the other.