Somehow I’m still alive, after three sinus infections this year. The combined allergies and air quality having tanked so hard has really done a number on me.

Still, let’s get some writing done while I can.

I’m not entirely sure what got me thinking about this particular subject, but I found myself ruminating on some of the environmental background I had as a child and how that affected me growing up. Well, okay, maybe I have a faint idea on what got me down this rabbit hole– it was someone saying how difficult it is to get bad teachers fired. That led me back down a chain of things that got me thinking about the environment I grew up in.

This one’s going to definitely be a stream of consciousness post, because it’s a series of things that lead from topic to topic.

Let’s start with my fifth grade teacher, who I ended up getting fired. We’ll call him “Mr. Hilton” to make it a bit easier; he’s probably been dead for years at this point, so I’m not exactly worried about him finding me in 2024. The guy was, frankly, not what I’d call a shining example of humanity. He’d had a class of mostly troubled students dumped on him, but his response was to fly into insane rages. Yelling, screaming, cursing, throwing things everywhere.. every day was him just unloading on his class. This made the kids– who would have been diagnosed as autistic a decade or two later– even less likely to cooperate, resulting in a feedback loop from hell.

This culminated with the point where one particular problem student, a shining example of developmental problems, stabbed him in the hand with a pencil. They didn’t remove the teacher nor move the student; as the student was a “known problem child” and they had nowhere else to put him, the administration shrugged and moved on with their life. This didn’t abate the guy’s temper any, obviously, and things continued to get worse.

I didn’t tell my parents about what was going on. I didn’t expect them to believe me, so I was intending to just quietly survive the situation. It was only going to be a year, right?

Well, around Christmas time, my mother was having a bit of a chat with our neighbor, Diane, at the dinner table. Diane was the mother of one of the other kids in my class, Billy. Billy was a perpetual thorn in my side, but we’ll leave that for another day. I happened to be in the room when Diane brought up that Billy was saying that the teacher was violent, cursing, etc.. and that she thought he was exaggerating.

This was the moment I finally spoke up. While I was never exactly on the best of terms with Billy, I couldn’t just leave him to take an unjustified accusation. I confirmed what was happening in the classroom, and that it was as bad as her son had suggested or worse.

Diane had been around my family since we’d moved in, which would have been five years prior. She knew I wasn’t the type to lie, especially not on something so important, and that caused both her and my mother to start– well, interrogating me is overstating it, obviously, but they wanted a lot more details. I don’t know precisely what happened between that weekend and the next Monday, but a very contrite Mr. Hilton apologized to the class repeatedly and declared that his behavior had been out of control and unwarranted. He was going to be allowed to finish out the year, which was only a few months left before summer break– but he didn’t say anything about after that point, and indeed he was gone before the next year of classes started that fall.

I believe that the administration was quite familiar with his attitude and issues, but required someone actually making enough of a stink to force them into action. They didn’t replace him immediately because it’s nigh-impossible to replace a teacher mid-way through the year, but he definitely was considered too problematic to keep past that point.

I wonder where he went after that point. Did he get a job as a teacher at another class somewhere? Did he find himself forced to change careers? I’ll probably never know, though there may be public access records if I really wanted to try to dig back into what happened.

The question that this all brings up in my mind is, “Why did I let this go on so long? Why didn’t I say something before this point?”

Environment. That’s it in a nutshell.

By that point, I’d internalized that yelling and screaming figures of authority were somehow normal. When I’d moved to Arizona when I was six years old, I hadn’t had a lot of experience with socializing as the place I’d lived before then had almost no children in general. Thus, of the first people I met the day I moved in, there were:

  • Patrick L, former marine, mental and physical abuser who yelled at his kids frequently, secret pedophile (yes, he was later arrested for molesting his own daughter and there is reason to believe he’d molested at least one other kid in the neighborhood before that family moved away)

  • Sean, son of Patrick, who was a model of Bart Simpson years and years before the Simpsons ever existed.

  • Chris, timid younger brother of Sean.

  • The daughter I’ll leave out of this, a couple of years older than Sean and I.

  • Diane S, our neighbor and landlord.

  • Leroy S, perpetually drunk blue-collar worker.

  • Billy, son of Diane and Leroy, bully in every way– even to his own mother. She lived in utter terror that he would call child protective services on her for basic discipline, so he got away with a lot of crap; this tragically ended up getting him killed about 14-15 months after this story. Billy is the kind of subject that would need an entire blog post to itself to get into any real detail. Yeah, a pretty messed up situation to put it mildly.

  • My own father, a Vietnam vet dealing with severe PTSD on top of Agent Orange exposure, wounds that wouldn’t heal (and eventually would cost him his leg), mentally abusive.

  • My own mother, quiet bastion of sanity in a crazy world.

When I went next door to visit Sean and Chris, I’d actually wait outside the door and listen for 30 seconds before knocking. I wanted to be sure that I caught them at a time when Patrick wasn’t raging at his family before I knocked.

You can see how all of this would lead to one internalizing that abusive behavior was normal, and how it might lead one to be a bit more timid than otherwise expected.

Hindsight often is 20-20, with cause and effect a lot more obvious than it would have been when you were living through it.

— Firehawke