The Dictates Of Silence

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I didn't really wanna get out of this town when I was a teen ager growing up as much as I wanted to get away the people who knew me and my family and rat me out. I wanted to start making decisions about my own life instead of having them made for me by others no matter how well-intentioned. I wanted to make my own mistakes and respond to what I knew for certain was my fault.

I abhor having fault assigned to me as if I have no say so about the reasoning behind my purportedly outrageous behavior. I had no intention what so ever of "going along to get along" unless there was a distinct and lucid reason for me to do so. I go along to get along a lot. It's practically impossible to replace that dynamic with another when the situation that harbors it dictates the "silence of the lambs".

If there was a real problem with me taking charge of my life by making as many decisions as I could about what to do, it wasn't a problem of me attempting to avoid mistakes pedantically. Sometimes the way I interpreted given situations worked out gloriously for me, and sometime there was a deeper hell to pay than I originally knew existed.

I knew about the possibilities I'd make foolish mistakes instinctively, but those instincts were fairly honed for a boy my age due to our family moving around so much that I ended up being not particularly close friends with anybody before we'd move on.

I got duped a lot by my need to find friends that were trustworthy. I remember when my family moved to this bigger little village/town in order for my oldest sister to be able to finish a twelve year academic program I was 7-8 years old. I entered the second grade at this new school. My confidence knew no bounds.

I was used to being around schools. Both my parents were school teachers, although my mother stayed at home until I was in the seventh grade. My father taught at every school I attended from first grade all the way through high school except for the sixth grade.

He was always within reach. I might see him through the windows of my classrooms as much as a couple of times a day. He was there for me. I took advantage of it without realizing it until now. My relationship with my classmates seemed contaminated by being a prominent teacher's son.

I'm perfectly aware I used the term "contaminated" instead of a softer term like "influenced". The situation became burdensome when my age group started their pubescent rebellion against authority. School teachers are very much authority figures for teen agers. Sometime my classmates expressed their rebellion against authority by deliberately making a fool out of me to get at my father.

I was a teen ager, but I was still a kid, and I was the new kid on the block who was desperate for friends in this new town my family moved to, and I was suckered into doing things that had much deeper consequences than being tricked by snipe hunts.

I seemed particularly vulnerable to the smartest guy in the room rather than the sports heros. From sixth grade on it was a cute, baby-faced midget with a smile that melted the motherly type girl's hearts. He was like their doll babies. Cuddlesome because he was smaller than average all the way through school. He had piles of curly hair.

I didn't particularly wanna be like him, but I did want the admiration he appeared to draw from the girls I was becoming acutely aware of. I didn't know him or even about his personality so well because we were not in the same home room during the day.

That changed a bit in high school because we began to have a few classes together. What I didn't know that might have been extremely helpful was that he was homosexual and I didn't know what that was yet. That had social implications I wasn't aware of because of my ignorance of what made homosexuals homosexual.

My ignorance was costly, both to me and my parents. What happened was insufferably shameful. I thought that only women displayed the fury of hell for being scorned. Why am I always the last to know?

This guy and his compatriots, another homosexual and his sister attempted to manipulate me into a situation in which I could be accused of rape. That part of it worked like a charm. I surely was accused, and brought indignantly in front of a panel or jury of all the authorities in my life including my father. Only the truth of my innocence bore me through this without total humiliation, but it changed my concept of how innocence would always work for me. They defrocked me of my innocence forever.

There was another participant in this situation that I hadn't really thought about as a possible sexual participant. That was the principle of the school who claimed during this kangaroo court that he had been the assistant warden of some state prison before he turned to education, and that during his time as a prison warden he never saw even a murderer on death row as hardened in their intent as me, this fourteen year old farm boy.

This was part of the reason I was able to get this body in exchange for my old one. Being accused of being a sociopath and pariah at the age of fourteen when I didn't have a clue I was being framed until the gathering of that panel of humiliation was enough to make him wanna throw himself off a bridge. Of course, finding a bridge to do that in the flat coastal plains was pretty much at lost odds anyway.

When it was over my father never wanted to speak of it again. But, years later I did, because I still didn't understand what happened. He allowed that it happened because of an argument between him and this principle, and this principle, who it was suggested was having sex with these half-way openly gay kid arranged the whole deal to humiliate my father.

The principle later got run outta town for a variety of crimes, but that was no compensation for my shame. It might have, however, initiated my life as a shamed man (shaman). That specific incidence of shame was bad, man, real bad, but it was only a preview of the coming attractions. '-)
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