I know how you feel

This American Life is, IMHO, the best thing on the radio. It’s broadcast weekly on public radio stations, though I listen to it via podcast, either on my computer or my phone. Some episodes are better than others, but every episode is an hour well spent. Check it out here.

Before yesterday’s episode the last two weeks were devoted to Harper High School, episodes 487 and 488. The TAL website posts this description:

We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter; Part One airs this week, Part Two is next week.

That a radio show would send three reporters to a high school for five months to create one story is astounding. The two hours were, of course, intense; the story is sad, compelling, heartbreaking, uplifting – all the things one would expect given the facts. I was transfixed.

I was also reminded of how very different my high school experience was in Richmond, Virginia, in 1965 and 1966. I’m sure there were kids who smoked marijuana, but I didn’t know of any, and I’m only sure NOW; back then I would have been stunned by the idea. There might have been gangs represented at our school, but I don’t think so. Of course there were fights now and then, but they were quickly-ended fist fights; neither guns or knives were involved.

Our big concerns in high school were “will we win the game Friday night,” and “will I score with my date Saturday night?” (And, for the record, “score” had a pretty tame meaning in my life back then).

It was still a Norman-Rockwell-Leave-It-To-Beaver world I lived in.

A couple years later I was in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in Aurora, IL, a small town 40-some miles west of Chicago. (Well, it was a small town THEN; now it’s second only to Chicago in terms of Illinois cities). One day two black women stopped by to visit someone they knew on our staff; they were from Holly Springs, Mississippi, and were just passing through. Several of us were talking over coffee and getting along well; the women were energetic, funny and clearly street-savvy.

I was thoroughly enjoying the conversation until I opened my large white mouth and stuck my squeaky-clean foot into it. In response to something hateful one of them had just described I stupidly said, “I know how you feel.”

The animated back-and-forth stopped on a dime and both women tore me a new one. “You do NOT know how I feel; you CANNOT know how I feel. You are a white boy, you have never experienced for a second what I experience every day of my life; don’t tell me you know how I feel, you clueless honky.”

They were right, of course. I learned an important lesson that day and have never forgotten it. After the explosion they actually tried to apologize and soothe my feelings, but I told them I deserved it and, in fact, I thanked them. I WAS a clueless honky back then and I appreciated the life lesson.

I don’t remember the names of those two brave and direct women, but I was thinking of them as I listened to Harper High School on This American Life. That was NOT my experience, and I do NOT know how those kids feel.

But I can guess at their pain and lament the society that forces them to go though it.