My World

And Suddenly A Light Came On

It was many years ago. I was young and just didn’t fit in. I thought that there were important things in the world. I didn’t care if my clothes were trendy or not. They were clothes. They did the job. There were times when I came home and couldn’t stop thinking about why I couldn’t just fit in.

By the time I was in Junior high school, I was reading a lot and thinking more and more about my world. I wondered about my place in it. I didn’t fit in but I wanted a mission to make me think that I was important. So many of the books that I read had been written by authors that had been banned for the ideas that they put in their books.  They had names like Dalton Trumbo, Howard Fast, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. They wrote books about a world that could be just and caring. I believed in them. Dalton Trumbo wrote Johny Got His Gun. Howard Fast wrote citizen Tom Pain. Jean Paul Sartre wrote Existentialism is Humanism and Camus wrote The Stranger. All books that looked at the world in ways that hoped for a change.

So slowly I began to find my mission. I still didn’t fit in and I wanted to more then anything I could think of. At the time, in the Los Angeles schools they believed that teaching children how to get along with each other was as important as reading, math, and history. Well, I just didn’t fit in. I worked at it. I tried so hard but I just didn’t fit in. I was better at picking clothes that were closer to what the rest of my school mates wore. I tried to play the games that they played but, they just didn’t interest me.

Now I must say that my parents didn’t fit in ether. They had taught me about a better world. The were members of organizations that were thought to be dangerous, although all they did was talk to each other and work to make the world a more caring place. Starting at a very early age I was allowed to stay up late and attend the meetings and listen to what was said. These people were from a tradition that tried to change the world in many nice ways. But they just didn’t fit in ether. Sometime they had trouble finding jobs. The more I watched the more convinced I became that freedom of speech was not real in America. One morning I was at a friend’s home and there was a knock on the door. My friend opened the door and was confronted with three men wanting to speak to her father. It was Saturday and so when she got him he came out wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. These men had a warrant for his arrest. He asked why, and they said that he knew. He said that he would come with them. He said he wanted to change into his clothes and use the bathroom. All three men followed him, even into the bathroom. I remember this as if it were yesterday. They took him away and there we sat not knowing what was happening. Suzie and Sara cried. Their mother Mrs. Fromkis just sat there. Finally she told us that it would be OK.

I finally went home and told my parents what had happened and they said that he had been arrested for saying things that were Un-American. This was the early 1950’s and that is what was happening to a lot of people that my parents knew.

It was about that time that I began to understand. It was as if, suddenly a light came on.  I began to understand why I didn’t fit in. Over the next few years I began to realize that it didn’t matter if I fit in or not. I was who I was and I believed in certain things that weren’t popular. I understood what my mission was. It was right in front of me all along. I wanted a world that cared about things that mattered. I wanted people to be treated fairly and I didn’t care about their color, religion, or where they came from.

This was America and if I couldn’t work on this here then where could I work on it. I began to read more books and many of them were about politics and philosophy. I found others that agreed with me and they also didn’t fit in. It was the fight that mattered. We didn’t want to overthrow the government; we just wanted to make sure that the constitution was followed. By the time I was in high school I was protesting, writing letters, and generally standing up for what I believed. What I was doing wasn’t popular, but we didn’t hurt anyone, or destroy anything. We just let people know what we believed and hoped that they would begin to think about it.

Nothing has really changed for me. The light is still on and I want a world where justice reigns. So there you have it. The light came on but it took some time for me to realize it. I am proud of who I became and thankful to my parents for standing up for me.

Peace, howie