Nostalgia and Memory

I was in high school during some key years of the American war in Viet Nam. My friends and I participated in large protests in Washington, like the Moratorium and the Mobilization in the fall of 1969, but we also organized our own protests at the school. We held a rally one afternoon in the bleachers by the football field. We wore black armbands one day in all our classes. After the murders of protesting students by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio and by police at Jackson State in Mississippi, we held a memorial in the park in front of school, which included lowering the flag to half staff.

One day during my senior year I was discussing the antiwar movement with a classmate, a girl who was not in my social circle, who told me that she, too, was opposed to the war. With my adolescent arrogance I asked why, if this were true, she did not participate in our Students for Peace organization, or in our protests. She told me that we were no organization at all, we were simply a clique. I insisted that she was wrong, that our meetings were open, and challenged her to come to the next one, which was in a few days.

That meeting was in the basement of a friend's house, which should have given me a clue. She arrived well after we started, with a friend for moral support, and left well before we finished. I was feeling pretty vindicated (and happy to have recruited two new members). But before they could exit through the basement door at the top of the stairs (and while I am certain they could hear) one of the members said, "Well, guys, should we let them in?"

She had been right. This was a clique after all. I felt pretty chastened. I apologized profusely to her. I expressed my strong disagreement to my friends over the notion that we were voting on new members, like a private club. And I am afraid this was not the last time I was mistaken about the true nature of something to which I committed myself.

I have reflected on that experience often over the years, usually to remind myself to be more open to comment and criticism. But I was reminded of it this week by people who remembered that same episode, but differently and fondly!

One of my high school classmates posted a photo on Facebook of a band practice. It was the same fellow in whose basement we held that Students for Peace meeting and the rehearsal was in that same basement. And -- reinforcing the critique that the peace organization was really a clique -- the set of people who were musicians in that band intersected considerably with the set of Students for Peace. I was a little surprised by the level of excitement that photo caused, but it was mostly people who I don't even have as Facebook friends, so... different strokes, you know?

Then, on day six of the nostalgia fest (really, it just kept going) certain people started reminiscing about the time the popular girls came to a band practice and asked to join! How am I certain that they were referring to the same incident? Because they called my name; they said the girls visited with me. They recalled this as a transformative moment, when the outsiders became insiders, when the insiders begged to join the outsiders. And this characterization is reinforced by a particular adolescent insecurity, the sense that some other circle of friends occupies a higher status than yours and is aspirational.

I understand this in teens, I really do. I have to say that I saw it much less during my career in city high schools than I did in the suburban high school I attended. In the fifteen years I spent in a school of 6000 I thought that was because there were just too many kids for them to be aware of any social hierarchy, only of their friends. In my twenty years in small schools I thought it was because we worked hard at creating community across the board, a sense of belonging and mutual respect. But maybe this kind of stratification is really a suburban phenomenon. I don't know. I really don't have broad enough experience to comment.

But I do feel uncomfortable seeing sixty-five year old men and women for whom this is still so vivid and so present. I am left wondering why they are still so identified with that moment, that band practice. Granted, there are ways in which I never graduated high school, since I attended every day until I was sixty or so. But I think I continued growing. I hope I continued growing.