Activism in My Youth

I went to seven different public schools before I quit grade-school altogether. I stopped attending classes a few months before my sixteenth birthday.

My final slide out of public education began when I left Southwest High School after the first quarter of tenth grade and started attending an “Alternative School” located a few blocks from my house on Lake Street and Colfax; it was called the Work Opportunity Center (W.O.C. for short), it was Uptown in Minneapolis

At W.O.C. the administration was barely holding things together, the quality of the teaching indicated that it might have been the last stop for most of those educators too. They were doing everything they could to keep bodies in the seats and kids off the streets and they were not very good at it.

For my friends and I, High School was about not fitting in, we were punk-rock, our coming of age was about finding a place outside the walls of the institution, apart from the mainstream, to provide a contrast to the insanity of social conformity.

It was 1984, and we were engaged in something new, something never before seen in the history of the world…so we told ourselves.

What we did not know, or could not put our finger on at the time, was that the things we were engaged in were motivated by an undifferentiated angst concerning the future of the world, which to an adolescent child in the mid 1980’s seemed tenuous at best.

I heard the call to revolution; I wanted to be a part of it. I heard it like the luring song of a sirens, though I was ill prepared for the odyssey, I dove in, completely disregarding the rocks that lay in front of me beneath the swells of excitement and adventure.

In the summer between middle school and high school, I found my tribe.

I became a new person. I went punk-rock.

From that point forward I stood against the social order, rejecting it, refusing to become what my friends and I blithely referred to as cogs in the wheel. We would not conform to the engine of society or live up to its expectations and intentions for us.

They would have to stamp us out before they stamped us into machine parts, we bravely asserted. 

Going-punk was how we referred to the transition from being a normal kid to being a radical, going-punk was a transformation, in-so-doing we became like superheroes or mutants. into something completely different, the transition to PUNK was a journey of the mind and spirit, reflected outward in our mode of dress.

“So-and-so went punk-rock,” is what we would say, and the sooner you got on the wave the better it was for your punk-rock status.

In Minneapolis, in my scene, I was among the earliest to cross the threshold into the counter-culture.

In that era going punk was an act of self-marginalization.

It was 1983, and it was dangerous.

Just cutting your hair differently meant exposing yourself to violence.

People freaked out.

I paid the dangers no-never-mind, violence was something I was used to, I knew what capacities I had inside myself to endure it. I experienced it at home, I had been dealing with it all my life, simply because I was me, because I was my brother’s brother.

My experiences had taught me this much, pain and violence were nothing to be afraid of, no matter how great they may seem in the moment…the moment itself is transitory, temporary, it will fall away and fade into nothing, as long as you do not hang onto it...

…or die from it

 “Going punk” was a statement, in as much as it was a journey, and how you made that statement mattered, you could not equivocate.

You had to speak-out and be loud.

You had to know your rationale for what you were doing, you had to defend the choice.

You had to be brave in the face of public scorn, stick together and stick up for those who were weaker than you.

People on the scene wanted to know why you went punk, and girls especially were keen on what you had to say for yourself.

There was a band out of California called Code of Honor, they had released a track by the same name on the flip side of a .45 rpm put out by another band called Agent Orange.

These were the lyrics to the song, they spoke to my gang about the duty that went with that fundamental choice of being punk:

Never desert your comrades in need in danger or in trouble

           Honor

Never minimize your strength or power

           Honor

Never seek praise to prove yourself worthy

           Honor

Never fear to hurt another man as long as you know it’s for a just cause

           Honor

Choose your own counsel, Be your own advisor, Be true to your own code

Because it’s better to die than to live a fucking lie

           It’s better to die

This song summarized the teenage idealism that fueled our nascent movement, we allowed ourselves to be shaped and mentored by such words.

In Minneapolis, in 1983 – 1984, when I was in the ninth grade, it was dangerous to walk down the street dressed differently than your peers.

Dyed hair, a mohawk, wearing any-kind of punk rock garb, were messages that the rest of the world saw that as threatening, and the world reacted to us as if we were a threat, foreign, alien, symbolizing moral indecency and social corruption.

Insofar as that was true, it was also true that we were not promoting it; we were a reflection of it. 

People would call us names, refuse to serve us in restaurants, not let us get on the bus, question everything about us and even target us for violence, including the police when we came to their attention.

We were constantly facing tests of the spirit, the world was set against us, and in those early years our possible allies were few and far between.

I believed that we represented something out of a mythic landscape, a strange world that society feared; in flauting their conventions we were telling them that their lives were meaningless, and that was a bitter pill for them to swallow.

We were different from the unruly hippies who had come before us, we were not sending a message of peace and love, the songs we sang were not beacons of hope and joy, there was no hope in our music, it was discord and violence and despair.

The punk-rock idiom was simple: the world has gone mad and it has no future…   

In the space of a year, I went from being a complete outsider, running away from everything and everyone, to being someone in the middle of a growing social movement, being one of the few among my friends who could articulate a rationale for what we were doing. And though I could articulate a philosophy that framed our activities, the truth was this: we ourselves did not know what we were doing.

We were making it up as we went along, drawing out our social critique like Harold drawing out his fantasies with his Purple Crayon, everything seemed possible but nothing was real.

It was a time of re-creation, and though we did not know it in the moment, we were changing American culture even while we were changing ourselves.

Nothing was sacred or off-limits to us, we gave little heed to tribal totems, disregarding all taboos; we were iconoclasts, anti-conformists. We had synthesized the social and cultural rebellions that had taken place in the generations before ours, and we took those movements to the lowest common denominator…just as Plato had foreseen.

We wanted to hold the generation that was holding power accountable for the precarious place they had brought us to: the immanent threat of nuclear war, rushing headlong toward ecological disaster, the looming destruction of the planet.

We were free children, free people and under the specter of Armageddon, we had nothing to lose and everything to live for.

I was fourteen turning fifteen in the ninth grade, half-way through the tenth grade before I was done with school, it was the spring of 1985, and my life had completely changed.

I had no interest in pep-rallies and though I was quite fond of the cheerleaders I had no interest in cheering or celebrating the games my classmates played on the football field or the hockey arena.

It is not that I did not want to see my classmates win, do well, excel, I did, but we were living in a time where the world itself was under the shadow of a doomsday clock, we were told every day that we needed to be vigilant, to oppose the Russians, to prepare for war.

All that pep and cheering was out of synch with the messaging coming at us from the rest of the world.

It was 1985.

The war in Vietnam had ended ten years earlier, at the same time we experienced a constitutional crises that ended the Nixon presidency.

Then American hostages were taken in Iran.

There was conflict in the Falkland Islands.

The Marine Barracks in Lebanon was destroyed killing hundreds.

We invaded the island of Granada and were doing covert operations, unsanctioned and illegal, in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras.

Arch Bishop Oscar Romero was assassinated, like the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the ‘60’s.

My friends and I did everything we could to tell those stories and undermine the institutions that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of turning our generation, kids from our economic class, into soldiers and automatons, into criminal actors who like Nazi soldiers in a previous generation took up arms and set out to kill because they were “just following orders.”

We protested the draft, against having to register for it.

We stopped practicing the military march in PhyEd, we refused to learn the thirteen-count manual, we would not conduct drills for the war machine.

We disrupted the pep rallies and we got into fists fights with the jocks who loved those things.

It was a time of crises, of social crises and identity crises.

We formed new ways of dealing with it, we bonded with each other in those trials, we stuck together, held close to one another and persisted in our resistance.

Nothing made sense in the bigger world around us, which on reflection, begged the question: Why be a part of it?

Mr, Halvorson, who taught Physical Education and Health, said this to me: “I know you. I’ve seen your type before. You are a loser, and I am going to be there on the day you drop out, the day Mr. Denucci hands you your walking papers.”

He was wrong about being there on the day I dropped out, I was no longer at Southwest when that happened, but he called it right when he predicted I would.

In that time of my life the city opened further to me.

I travelled on foot, by bus, on bike or in the cars of my friends who drove.

I was an activist.

I got arrested.

I challenged city officials, even the police.

I gave speeches.

I rallied students.

I went to concerts all over town, on campus at the University, in clubs, long before I was of age and it was legal for me to be there.

I defied convention and set my own path, whatever remained of a conventional childhood I left behind me.

I had no time for school, for pep-rallies, for social conditioning.

I had more important things to do.

I had activism.

I had literature.

I reassured myself with a myriad of minor deceptions and grandiose delusions, lies I told myself to bolster my self-esteem, because, in the end, everything I did after leaving high school had more to do with chasing girls and getting high than it did with living up to the idealism I swore by.

I was a rebel and a pretender.

I could go anywhere and talk to anyone.

Even the forbidden places of the city belonged to me.

I ran the streets with my friends, slept on them, resting my head on pillows of brick, on beds of asphalt and concrete.

Those of us who left school early were too busy to check into a classroom, or to be governed by convention; I felt that if I did, I would miss something crucial that was happening on the scene.

I spent my days staring out the windows of my classroom and dreaming of what would come to me at night, the adventures I would have. It was like walking in a myth, as the misty hours slipped past me and gave way to the dawn.