Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502240002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I am afraid of George Allen because I cannot diagnose, having never taken an abnormal-psychology class, what precise infirmity of the mind would cause him to think that our money would better be spent on prisons than schools. Still, I have wondered: Is the ailment ours and not his alone? Have we come down with some national virus of irrational thought? Has the cell or enzyme that is supposed to recognize wrongheadedness gone haywire within the collective American brain? Has our entire nation forgotten that the solution to almost every problem from teen-age pregnancy to drive-by shootings is - and always has been - information and knowledge?
When I was in college, I knew a man who had sold a Detroit newspaper to come to Virginia, live like a Southern gentleman and teach journalism. During the faculty parties I used to go to with my father (where I was expected to listen to others talk but never talk myself), he used to constantly complain about how beastly his beastly students were.
I was not one of them, but I remember knotting my brow in an unbecoming grimace when he would go on about how intellectually impaired, grammatically gauche and culturally clumsy "the students" these days were. No one else seemed to be bothered by his comments, though. Instead, they would nod their heads in full agreement - the students did seem to get worse and worse; more brain-dead than brain-dead, these head gestures seemed to say to me - 'cause you can't teach a pig to read.
I was a student, of course, so these insults, though I was not being hit directly by them, insulted me.
Now, because I am on the other side of the river, I understand why.
One would never snicker as a 1-year-old wobbled and fell down in her first attempts to take those three steps between the coffee table and the couch. One would never laugh at a 5-year-old's not knowing that you must thrust your legs outward and away from you before you push them backwards in order to go forward on a bike.
No, if one had any sense about him at all, one would, instead, crouch down upon the antique rug and take the hands of the just-walking baby. One would, with a genuine and serviceable smile upon one's face, tell - and better yet, show - that 5-year-old how bike riders ride bikes.
Now if even the professors have these devilish doubts about their students' abilities to learn to see and grow and understand and know, why should we be surprised about George Allen's knotheaded way of thinking?
But I don't mean to suggest I am free of nightmares on murder and mayhem; I am not. I remember feeling quite strongly, after he was convicted of murdering a little girl just miles from my house, that Billy Layne ought to sit the remainder of his days in a dark prison cell and that it ought, if there were any justice in the world, smell terribly of urine and other unpleasant things. I mean, George Allen is right to understand our need for prisons: There are people out there who ought not to be out there. There are people running around the streets with butcher knives and bombs and axes and hatchets and such.
But as children do not shout "I hate you" to their parents or behave in any otherwise inappropriate and unacceptable way out of an innate desire to be mean and nasty, many criminals do not commit crimes because they have this inherent, evil desire, like the Joker in the first Batman movie, to be disobedient, perverse, ominous and rotten.
The necessity of preserving and funding educational institutions like the community college (which pays me so little to teach my classes I've often considered putting a tip jar on my desk) and social programs like the one my mother administers - whose function is to help pregnant substance abusers get unaddicted and have healthy babies - is so obvious, I really cannot understand why I'm sitting here insisting on it.
The best way to solve the social problems that most often arise because of our incomprehensible ability to disregard the abandoned and heartbroken and unemployable and poor, the best way to approach the could-be murderers and thieves and drug addicts and prostitutes and pregnant young girls, is to teach them - and in very serious ways this means to love them - before it's too late.
You can't do that by laughing at students or by underestimating in any other way the value and expense of the exchange that goes on in a classroom, whether full of first-graders or college freshmen. You can't do that by making jokes about the uneducated and illiterate, and certainly - I mean, for heaven's sake - you cannot do that by building more prisons. The only way you can do it is to get down on your knees, lower your head in a moment of authentic prayer, lift it again, then affectionately help that student tread - step by step by step - into your unconditionally open arms.
Adrian Blevins-Church teaches writing at Virginia Western Community College.
by CNB