VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1
Afterword, Written at the End of the First Semester
Let me step down off the platform for a moment, and stop teaching, and just talk to you.
For a whole semester we have been on one thing, and that one thing is torment. We started from a line that came drifting off the internet, and we gave it a name, and we followed it down. Where it comes from, how it happens, the little power and the four gears behind it, the resentment and the scorn in the heart, the five forms it takes in the hands, the two directions it runs, out and in, the pen that will not pass a verdict on it, the way it gets dyed down from one generation to the next, the boundary where the law can no longer reach it. And then we turned around, and looked at what a culture is when it goes hard, at the bedrock hard to the point of being invisible, at how it goes all the way down into the cells and hands itself down in a single line, until at the end it stood up as one tree.
I want to tell you why I spent so long on a thing this small.
Because it is not small. Because the cold face behind the window, the extra trip, the paperwork short one thing, the tone that will not look at you, this is the thing most of us actually meet, over and over, a whole life long. Not the war on the news. Not the crime in the film. This. The small, daily, nameless thing that leaves your chest tight and gives you nothing you can point to. I did not want to leave you alone with it, unable to say what it was. Giving it a name is the first mercy. Once a thing has a name, you are no longer its prisoner. You can look straight at it.
And I want you to remember one thing above all the rest. In all of these thirteen chapters, I never once called a person bad. Not the clerk behind the window, not the one who resents, not the one who scorns. Because the moment I do that, I have picked up the very ruler the tormentor holds, and I have begun to measure a living person with it, and I have become, myself, the thing I was against. The whole semester was built to keep both of us from picking up that ruler. To see clearly, and not to convict. That is the harder road, and it is the only one that changes anything.
So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this semester. Not a verdict to hand down on other people. A name, and an eye. And nine things to hold, your time and your energy and your attention, your relationships and your trust and your health, your skill and your reputation and the warmth still left in your heart. And under all of it, one plain fact about your own life. You have sat on both sides of that window. You have been tormented, and you have tormented. Which means the whole thing turns, in the end, on a single second. The second you feel the sourness rise, the second you want to block, the second you are about to bring the cold word down on someone smaller than you. In that one second, if you can see clearly, and pause, and trade places in your heart, you do not dye the color on down. And a chain that ran for who knows how many generations comes loose, by one link, at you.
That is not a small thing. That is the largest thing an ordinary person is ever asked to do.
Whatever in these pages holds true is the ancestors', and I only carried it down. Whatever is told wrong, or thin, or crooked, where I passed their meaning on askew, is mine, and mine alone.
The first semester laid the root. The second puts it to use, and it begins with the thing the root lives or dies by, how it gets handed to the next generation. That is education. I will see you there. For now, take these words back into your own days, back to your own window, your own counter, your own child. And in that one second, may you lean, every time, toward the kinder side.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.