More family history - education

Further Confessions


"You can't live in the world as it ought to be.  You must live in the world as it is."

This statement, in various forms and contexts, is literally "the story of my life."  Like, I'm not the realist.  I'm not the one who has lived in grinding poverty in the streets and fields of Amerika all my life. 

But I have learned from it. 

Of course, most people have no idea.  They can't even imagine what it's like to be hungry (something I have admittedly never been - unless, of course, by choice); to have no home, no land, no friends, no "support group", no one who even cares if you live or die.  Or to be fighting against an implacable robot army, which kills indiscriminately and without warning or reason.  To have your land, your home, your business, your government humiliated and destroyed, replacing it with some sort of "democracy" controlled by the Zionists. 

Or to have a family which is so ingrown and reactionary that even one born and raised here has no idea what the hell they are doing except that it's some sort of faux monarchy or theocracy, and somehow, we're part of it. 

Such is the reality I inhabit.  I didn't choose it; I found it.  It was already there.  I didn't invent it.  Other "realities" I have inhabited include the World of Ayn Rand, which fictionalizes (satirizes) several major Montanans, as well as the Russian-Jewish aristocracy which controls so much of Amerika, today.  If you're familiar with the character of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, I know her well. I think she was modeled on my mother, who was Jean Arthur's cousin, and looked a lot like her - an actress very familiar to Ayn Rand. 

Just to give you an idea, both Jean and my mother, Vivian, had a favorite aunt, Palma Nelson.  Guess what she did?  She was the first licensed woman railroad engineer (train driver) in the country, and she worked for the NP out of Billings.  I have yet to see an NP museum which displays this fact, or anything about her, but I'm hoping I'll see it before I pass on.  We're all counting on Mr. Buffett to save us from The Octopus.

Here is another "reality" I occupy or share.
 
Perhaps I was autistic (we lived directly down-wind from the Anaconda Smelter in Great Falls, so who knows how much lead and mercury -and even uranium, polonium, etc. - I inhaled and ingested as a child?).  Or perhaps I had a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome.  I've certainly been a "social moron" all my life, having little or no idea why most people think and act as they do.  And this would prevent me from being in the honors math and science classes in high school, even though I tested at the highest levels in those subjects, and desperately wanted to be an astro-physicist until I actually arrived at college, when I changed my major to Economics with a minor in Philosophy.  By that time, I had developed severe blocks against learning math in a classroom.  The numbers were just not adding up. 

From the school's persepective, I was a very slow learner, basically unteachable, yet my first IQ test given in the 2nd grade recorded a score of 145 - well into the genius level.  I couldn't read at all until I was midway through the 2nd grade, and only did that by comparing a story (about dinosaurs) I already knew almost by heart with the printed text.  I also had an excellent 4th grade teacher who recognized my innate intelligence and potential.  It's interesting to reflect that both she and my second grade teacher were Jewish - Miss Green and Miss Amman (are there Jordanian Jews?  I think so!). 

Of course, I didn't know that I was "a slow learner" at the time, anymore than I knew I was a genius, and only found that score by getting a copy of my GFPS records in the early 1990's.  Having come from what was then called "a broken home" and family plagued by alcoholism and other addictions, I was always short on self-esteem.  But I was a "gifted underachiever," and once I learned to read, I spent several hours a day on my own researches, and always tested several grade levels above my own. 

As with Isaac Asimov, the public library was my salvation, along with comic books.  That library no longer exists, so any young person with similar "issues" will be SOL.  Of course, they were probably on the internet by the age of 6, so it really won't make much difference, except that they will be cyborgs while I was just a simple American farmer with delusions of grandeur.  Not too far from Luke Skywalker, actually.

My handicaps were poor handwriting, lack of physical coordination, and very poor social skills, so I was considered semi-retarded by most of my teachers.  And I never participated in sports, nor was I any sort of "team player."  I would have liked to skip a grade or two, as my father had in his one-room country school at Upper Highwood, but that was no longer "done".  And so, I continued to struggle along, wasting time being taught stuff I had already mastered years before, and being discouraged from pursuing other studies on my own. 

Fortunately, I usually had one or more peer friends who was on the same track, and when in high school, my friends were among the elites - both working class and professional - and they were all high achievers.  So, it was the books and discussions I shared with them which shaped my later development. And of course I was always part of the "landed aristocracy" as well as Masonic and other societies.  That was a time when a political campaign called "the Great Society" could actually flourish and win.  

All the more difficult, I suppose, for people I grew up with in Montana (family and friends/associates alike) to understand what I am doing, now.  Gone entirely from their view is the young man I was in California, handsome, popular, and even athletic.  Or the struggling writer and intellectual I became in Boulder, CO, or the esthete I would become in Missoula 3 years later.  In Great Falls, I have worked as a substitute teacher, cab driver, and perhaps best-known of all, a public-interest activist and 3-time candidate for local office (never getting more than 10% of the vote, against people who weren't even born here, and never went to college). 

So, you have to call me an abject failure in all worldly respects.  The world "as it ought to be" is of no interest to anyone.  We just want to play the same old games of "who do you know?" and "how much money do you have?"  Those determine everything.  And even if I know more people than I thought, apparently I don't know "the right people," although I still know many of the leading families and individuals in town (most of whom apparently have a very low opinion of me, by now). 

It always amazes me in these blogs and the comments to news stories just how few of these "bold and beautiful" civic leaders ever say anything at all.  Apparently they are all following Lincoln's maxim (or was it Mark Twain's?) that "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."