I was thinking again this morning about times when two people say the exact same things but mean something very different by them. Sometimes it’s because of the ambiguity of language. But sometimes it’s because of fundamentally different values.

The first time I noticed it was probably in the early ’70’s. Animal rights activists used to have a table on Central Park West, on the corner by the American Museum of Natural History. They had informational literature opposing animal experimentation, and they were protesting the practice in the museum’s labs. I stopped one day, curious because two men were screaming at each other. But I quickly realized that I couldn’t tell which side of the issue either of them was on, because they were both shouting: “What if they were doing these experiments on humans!”

This wasn’t about ambiguity of language at all. This was clearly about values. One man (I don’t know which) intended those words to mean “The atrocity of the experiments is clear if you wouldn’t want them done on you.” The other was arguing “We need the knowledge from those experiments and it’s better to do them on rats than on people.” But what they both were saying was: “What if they were doing these experiments on humans!”

I have heard this sort of clash of values over many years in the high schools. A teacher and a student are shouting at one another, sometimes to the amusement of the rest of the class, sometimes to their consternation, but usually both. The best option is first to get the student somewhere else, to calm them down a little, while the teacher gets back to the rest of the class. Then you can talk to each of them later, out of the white-hot forge of a classroom with an audience of thirty-some other teens. More often than not, each blames the other, but usually they both make the same argument, that teachers and students are not equal.

“She is the child, I am the adult,” says the teacher. But what he means is that teens owe unquestioning deference, respect, and obedience to their elders.

“He is the adult, I am the child,” says the student. But what she means is that teens can be forgiven for immature behavior like losing their tempers and shouting, but teachers should have outgrown all that.

This is clearly not a productive line of conversation. As a principal I only ever called it to the faculty’s attention in the absence of an actual argument. In the heat of the conflict, it was always better to skip this as an irreconcilable difference and get to the specifics instead. Then it was always possible to ask them to step into one another’s shoes. You ask the teen to imagine themselves trying to manage an entire class. You ask the teacher to imagine themselves being called out in front of a roomful of their peers.

Saturday Night Live did a memorable sketch back in the ‘80’s about nuclear reactor with a melting core. This was several years after Three Mile Island but a few years before Chernobyl so I guess we knew enough to understand it but we’re still prepared to chuckle. Ed Asner played a grizzled veteran engineer who knew every inch of the power plant. The SNL ensemble played the young graduates who were taking over upon his retirement. His last words before leaving them in charge were: “You can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor.”

Maybe you saw this. Maybe not. I’ll spoil the joke by explaining it. In the face of crisis, with the core melting, the ambiguity of his words emerges as they argue about how to save the lives of all the people for many miles around. Does that mean “No amount of water is too much; flood the reactor”? Or does it mean “Be careful, too much water is dangerous”? 

Around the same time that sketch was broadcast, many of the preschoolers my daughter’s age were testing for Hunter College Elementary School. My memory is that the only admissions point was kindergarten and that they accepted the top forty applicants from Manhattan and the Bronx. I just now glanced at their website and I see that they are still admitting new pupils only to kindergarten, fifty of them, all from Manhattan. I had some interest in the school for my daughter, but zero intention of allowing her to be subjected to a standardized test at that age. I knew a couple of children who were accepted and attended. I knew more than a few, some of them exceptionally bright, who were turned down. I also knew that most parents in the boroughs had no idea that this opportunity even existed. Many of their children were, of course, very gifted. Who knows how they would have done on a test written by people from a totally different social background?

Every single child in my daughter’s preschool took that test, except her. Not one of them was admitted. One dad, though, took his little girl’s rejection extremely hard. We were talking about it and he was angry, disappointed, and skeptical, too. I wanted to reassure him that it wasn’t the end of his daughter’s opportunities and that it wasn’t a reflection on her abilities or potential. I was about to say, “I find it easy to imagine that forty children from the entire boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx could score higher than my daughter on some standard test on any given day.” I meant that there are a lot of four-year olds in a population of over 2.5 million people, that standard tests don’t measure what they purport to, and that, in any case, anyone can have a bad day.

But before I could get those (I thought) reassuring words out, he said to me, “I find it hard to imagine that there could be forty children in Manhattan and the Bronx who could score higher than my K.” 

All I could do was silently wonder what he saw in her that nobody else did. She was a reasonably bright, articulate, and curious child, but she certainly had not distinguished herself intellectually from her classmates during preschool. Their cohort is now approaching forty-years old. She still hasn’t. What could I have said, then, that would have reassured that dad?

But the example of one message meaning two things that is always strongest in my memory was an experience I had at Giants Stadium in the fall of 2001. It was just weeks after the attacks on the twin towers. Things were sombre all over and being at a football game at all felt so strange. I was with my friend G. who had gotten the tickets. 

Some time in the second quarter I noticed that he kept turning around angrily. I asked what’s up and he said some asshole behind him was throwing peanut shells at his head. Sure enough, there was a row of drunken bozos yukking it up. I should mention here that only three days earlier I had broken up a gang fight between the Bloods and the Jamaicans in the street near Monroe High School in the Bronx, initially by myself because the Bloods had staged a distraction inside the building. My feeling was that I was not going to be intimidated by what I thought of as a crew of suburban lawn-chair salesmen.

 I just told them to knock it off. In the wake of 9/11 I was going to add, “With everything that’s going on in the world, you really want to throw peanut shells?” 

But once again, before I could get those words out of my mouth, the loudest yukker asked me, “With everything that’s going on in the world, you really care about a few peanut shells?” 

I wasn’t quite speechless. I did reply, “Yes, I do. Knock it off.” And the shelling did stop. But I was, nevertheless, astonished. It’s hard today, in the midst of severe national division, to recreate the feeling of nineteen years ago when so many people felt that we were in something together. (It’s odd, too, given the fact that COVID-19 has killed a hundred times as many Americans as those hijackers did.) But I remember people saying that nothing would ever be the same, that we would never take each other for granted. I guess they were also saying, though, that we would never again allow ourselves to get preoccupied with minutia. I guess those drunks thought chucking peanut shells at a stranger was minutia.

There is a lesson buried in here. For now, these are just morning memories.

Afterword on memory: I would have sworn that the Giants played the Steelers that Sunday. I would have sworn the game went into overtime. A quick look at the Giants schedule for 2001 tells me that they never played the Steelers that season and that no game went into overtime. The schedule tells me that we must have been at an October 7 game against Washington, when the score was tied 9-9 after three quarters. I’m still pretty certain about the rest of it.