Trash Problems

High school hallways weren’t really places you wanted to hang out.

For one thing, my high school was enormous. You really had to hoof it to get to a class you had on the other side of the campus, and even when your class was next door, the administrators and teachers frequented these corridors, too.

There was a widespread view among us kids that these administrators abused their power. In retrospect, I think I understand some of the challenges they faced much better now, but I want to take you back to high school with me for now, where administrators were incredibly intimidating.

I remember stopping in the middle of one of those hallway sprints, where I was following the flow of traffic (kids frantically trying to get to their next class) when I bent down to pick something up. I was curious: was this a sticker? A pamphlet of some sort?

No, it was just a piece of trash someone had meant to throw away.

I set it back down on the ground and continued my walk to my next class, and then I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was one of those administrators.

It seems I was in a bit of trouble for putting the trash exactly back where I had found it. This was one of those scenes where I felt a mountain of injustice weighing on me, but in retrospect it was kind of silly to feel that way. Still, isn’t this an interesting dilemma for a fifteen-year-old to encounter?

I had the trash in my hand, so a great deal of the work of throwing it away had been done by yours truly. Still, I didn’t feel as though I had any sort of ethical obligation to throw the piece of paper away.

Actually, that’s not entirely right. While I certainly understood that some portion of the work had been done and saw the wisdom in preserving that work, in a manner of speaking, I felt even more strongly that this admin didn’t have any ethical standing to force me to throw the paper away.

This wouldn’t be the last time I’d feel that way about an administrator at my high school. One of my most vivid memories from all of high school occurred shortly after Nirvana’s Nevermind was released:

I can’t say I was totally shocked when an administrator called me into his office to tell me I couldn’t wear that shirt to school that day. I immediately found this request to be absurd and beyond the pale—for one thing, being so uptight about human biology that you’re worried about a baby’s genitals showing seems like a very weird take.

For another thing, adult humans should understand by now that this sort of control won’t have the desired effect. It’s hard to articulate how meaningful this administrator made this moment for me, and I’m confident their goal was not to radicalize me.

Oops.

Both of these incidents fueled the burning rebellious streak in me. When I was told I had to throw away the trash, I very nearly ended up in detention because I viewed this as a moral issue. The same was doubly true of the Nevermind shirt.

I probably flashed back to other times when I’ve felt this way, like when my second grade teacher called me out for what appeared to be me eating candy in class (but wasn’t):

Every fiber of my being was ready to protest, but what exactly could I say? “I’m sorry, Mrs. Zajkowski, but I seem to have done some kind of micro-rumination. You know what? I’m gonna be much better equipped to explain this in about 40 years. Do you mind if I get back to you with my explanation then?”

I felt that way back then because I didn’t have the language to express my point of view. That’s because even everyday situations like these require nuance, and nuance only comes with time and experience… and an open mind.

In all of these cases, there’s an added layer of nuance that one side or the other doesn’t see. Binary thinking, as co-author

Michael Woudenberg

and I described, doesn’t really help us here—though it has helped us for most of our history! In Beware the Binary, we discussed ways to combat the tendency to see everything in such stark terms.

Now, I may have a somewhat heightened sense of injustice, but I bet I’m not alone with these sorts of experiences. Have you faced administrative injustice that required a nuanced conversation you just weren’t capable of having back then? Any other similar stories come to mind?