Never Again

Geoffrey Clarfield (November 2013)

 In memory of the late Emil Fackenheim, mentor and colleague.

In truth, Crestwood Heights Junior High School was the first foreign country I ever traveled to, where students from the three different primary or prep schools of our borough congregated. The number of students was larger than at West Prep where I hailed from, the faces more diverse and the faces of the girls more varied and exotic than I had been accustomed to during my seven years of primary school.

When these fights broke out fear gripped us all. It could have been a part of one of those classic prison films, like the Shawshank Redemption, of a sudden all of us were linked subliminally by our fear, like a group of feuding vervet monkeys, the fear transferring itself across the locker room like an electrical current and leaving us all in a state of primitive anxiety.

The drama of the situation was simply that it was not a drama. There was no frame. It was not Superman, Batman or a film. It was real, dangerous, life threatening and worst of all, voluntary. We crawled to the edge of the roof and lay down, on our stomachs. We then positioned ourselves so that we lay with our bodies towards the center of the roof and our heads over the edge.

They outlined the moral responsibility that I had held and betrayed. I felt more worry at their disapproval than I did moral guilt. Anthropologists would say that at that time in my moral development I still inhabited the honor and shame culture of the ancient Greeks of the Iliad and had yet to enter, developmentally speaking, the Biblical world of right and wrong, transgression and atonement.

Me: No sir.

Sadowski: Admit it, you think this is a joke and that this is very funny (his volume rising and temper flaring).

Me: Yes sir, it is very funny.

Sadowski: Well the reason you think it is so funny is that you have never lived through a war! I have lived through a war and it is not funny!

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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