How to Assemble a Paul Bot: Step 2

     You’ll never be able to wash away the memory of the first time your mom dropped you off to school. You can still see her getting smaller and smaller as she walked away from you and towards those giant, iron, double doors at the end of a checkered board tile linoleum floor. She disappears in a blinding light as the sun pours in when the door is cracked. You can barely make her out turning to wave good bye before she’s gone, gone, gone. Your throat gets thick and you try to swallow it down. Turning back into the classroom you can see the traumatized looks on all the other kids faces as well. Some of them aren’t going to make it. They’re the ones already sniffling. Nuff said on that first day. Brings back the darkness in me.

It wasn’t all bad though once that boot camp phase was over and done with. Once you’d been acclimated to get up every day at five a.m., sleepily shove toast or pop tarts into your mouth, say ‘here’ or ‘present’ or for the rebel ‘president’ when your name was called on the role, raise your hand to speak, ask permission to perform bodily functions, sit in an assigned seat, walk everywhere in an ant drone manner, place your hand over your heart and swear a pledge to nationalism when you have no capacity to understand what you’re saying, and respond to bells like Pavlov’s dogs. When the conditioning is done and all of this seems normal you are able to jump through the hoops with little thought. In the short time you are allowed recess you begin to see something new happening on the playground; the other kids have managed to break themselves up into smaller groups and drift from the whole. You find this curious and must investigate. After drifting in and out of each group you come to the conclusion that the reasons for separation are for the most arbitrary of reasons. Some have decided that only those with high top sneakers can be in their kid tribe while others have chosen the home team model only cling to those who happen to live in the same neighborhood as they do. The kids who unfortunately drew the short stick in the department of having decent human beings as parents found logic in forming groups based of the pigmentation of their skin and the common culture such pigmentation implied. None of their logic on why a bunch of kids all thrown into the same situation against their control would want to make this dread of a time worse by forming little warring parties, you decide it best to stay out of this type of behavior which curiously never occurred before entering the public school system….hhmmm.

    Becoming introverted seemed the best course of action for a while. You chose to shift most of your focus on what was being taught rather than the social experiment outside and it seemed to work those early years. You learned to read, that’s cool. You learned to right, huh huh, that’s cool. Nice dose of Christopher Columbus here, little dash of physical science there and when you got some free reading time stocked up, you treated yourself to some Greek mythology. You were getting the swing of this education thing and your marks were looking quite spiffy. The teachers loved how much attention you paid and how much gumption you had to do extra credit work and you were too tickled with yourself to notice that the other kids in the class that you were always making look like drooling idiots…well …drooling idiots are typically harmless when they move undisturbed in their herds but when someone shows up that is obviously more awake, more aware, then they can become a little hostile you teacher’s pet. Your chance of joining any of the little clans anytime soon has pretty much been shot and you’re cool with that until something new happens again, something that shifts your perspective on the routine you’ve created. When you are taught about your country’s history, rich with founding fathers, tyrant kings, shots heard around the world and documents enshrining and testifying that you were fortunate enough to have been born in a free country. Praise the Lord. You are free and you know you are because your teacher just said so, the text book just said so, the text of the Constitution in the book said so and quite frankly you agree. Naturally when you the feel the next leak coming on and get up to go to the bathroom (I was going to put lavatory but wasn’t quite sure how to spell it. Oh wait! Spell check.) and the teacher yells you down for not asking permission. In shock you watch as she does the unthinkable and…writes your name on the chalk board. When you ask what that’s suppose to do she snaps that metal chalk stick right back up there and darned if she doesn’t draw a check mark beside your name. You tell her to her infuriated face that you don’t even know what that means and crap, she draws another friggin check mark and this time she does it so hard she breaks the tip of the chalk clean off. As you shrug in an amazement that’s like “Am I on candid camera or something? What is this situation even suppose to mean?” you are ordered to make a trip to the principal’s office where by the time you get there the entire ordeal has already been relayed to the warden…principal I mean, through the intercom.

Suspension for some but for those with enough clout, merely sent home for the day. When having the ‘talk’ back home with the parents you declare to them that you will no longer be attending school because you live in a free country and in the exorcism of that freedom you do not wish to return to the cinder block asylum with its single file lines and food served perpetually in the shape of an ice cream scooper. Most of you had it explained to you in very generic terms so that it was enough to let you know it was important but not so much that it freaked you out. It went something like, “If you don’t go back to school, mommy and daddy will get in trouble. You don’t want mommy and daddy to get in trouble do you?”. Then there were some of us who had a dad that shot from the hip it was laid out for us like this;
“ Look, if you don’t go back then these people are gonna come beatin’ on the door with a badge that says DFACS or CPS. Yeah, I know they told you those guys are looking out for abused kids, and sure maybe some of them are. That doesn’t change the fact that these guys are having to meet a quota of certain types of little boys and girls that some fat cat in the United Nations with diplomatic immunity out the wazoo gave em so said kids could be rounded up like cattle. I mean think about it, how many different faces of missing kids have you seen on milk cartons when you go to the grocery store with your mom? A lot right? Well do you really think there are that many lunatics out there just snatching kids left and right? Of course not, there are only a few and they are highly organized and deeply entrenched within the structures of our government and with their political and financial power they create departments like CPS or DFACS to do the exact opposite of what they tell the public. I mean open your eyes and read some statistics, it’s simply a fact that children who get taken into custody by the state are way more likely to be physically, emotionally, sexually and morally abused than had they been left in the care of their parents. I mean I don’t mean to make you have nightmares my little eight or nine year old but these are just the facts and sooner or later you are just going to have to realize that child sacrifice by the world’s power elite never really went away its simply went incognito. Now unless you want to be shipped off to some country that ends ins ‘slavia as a child prostitute who specializes in reenacting that scene from “A Christmas Story”…you know…the flagpole thing…yeah, well let’s just say you’re going to school tomorrow okay? Okay. Night Night.”

Dad was a real kidder sometimes. Whichever version you got, through the crystal clear, innocent eyes of a child you saw your first crack in the hologram, so to speak. Having a mind that as of yet had not been locked in this box or heaven forbid, that box yonder ways, you know and feel within your soul that something is terribly, terribly wrong. You are free but you are not free? Your parents created you but strangers who don’t know you can snatch you away? This enigma baffles you and though you intend to get to the bottom of it and seek out the answers to the question your young mind yet lacks the vocabulary to formulate, something unexpected is about to happen. A chemical reaction which will take your journey on a long detour, but we will get to that in a minute.

To be continued…

D.L. Crumpton