That’s something I read recently on the internet. It sounds like an unintended joke pun.

That’s what language can do, make felicitous but unexpected juxtapositions. Even great authors do it, and when you point it out, they say, “You’re right. I didn’t notice that when I wrote it.”

If I had access to great writers, I could have been helpful.

I don’t wish to sound arrogant. I know I pontificate, but I know I’m right, thus dismissing objections.

The reason I bring it up now is because I was thinking back, again, to my career, teaching in the classroom.

And the treacherous internet, which lures you in and fills your mind so you don’t have to breathe. AI only exacerbates the situation, floods me with accounts of the current status of “education.”

I need to take a break from such reading, take a breather, because the sense of panic over the current situation can overwhelm me.

It’s worse than I could have imagined. I don’t want to succumb to paralysis. The crisis demands confrontation and a course of action.

I’ve always been a rebel (though I didn’t realize it at the time). I’ve always found ways, and when one didn’t work, I changed direction.

The world disappoints me. The people who should know better don’t know what to do. They neutralize themselves by “we cannot allow…” and “we must take action…” Words without action won’t do it.

I find myself at a disadvantage, because I was never a part of my generation. I couldn’t afford it. My family and I had no money. My friends lived in owned houses, drove cars, cruised with girls to drive-in restaurants while the car radio played the popular music of the day.

I hop-frogged over my generation straight into maturity, but unprepared, so I belonged nowhere.

And I married young. Shirley and I were the first in our high school graduating class to get married. They said, “We never thought it would be you.” I said, “Me neither.”

But I did it right. It seems that when you find early the perfect completion, in a sea of divorces and lonely people, you are in a diminishing minority. I realize that.

And when I leaped at my own education, because I loved to read and learn and think, I do realize again that I am in a diminishing minority.

Which is why, when I thought, it was with a desperate intensity, to give my beloved students all I could, all I had, to make their lives better, and by extrapolation, the whole world.

I am in the process of withdrawal, not blaming myself for not doing more.

I can console myself, partially, by re-reading the letters and responses of my students. “When I was in your class, and you were talking, I was in ancient Greece, or in the court of Queen Elizabeth I in the English Renaissance that included but went beyond Shakespeare, I was on the Bridge of San Luis Rey, or in the trenches of World War I, or in an African village, or the French countryside, or the canals of Venice, or Russia before and after the Revolution, or the Plains of Abraham where American and British troops together stopped the Canadian French from engulfing the future United States, or…”

My high school students could read and write and think, respected truth and argue opposition into silence, could transcend their college counterparts and were offered scholarships at the universities of their choice, and have gone on to presence in the larger world. There are so many who keep me going, memories that give me a reason to live, reminders that my work is not yet done.

But then of course there were those who challenged me, who resisted. Like the bright student, trying to look right through me, said famously, “You don’t like anything that’s popular, do you? And if something you like became popular, you wouldn’t like it anymore.”

Such insight! I love it when students would challenge me. I might answer, “My job is to make it popular.”

Another student wrote, “When you told us you were shy, I couldn’t believe it, but then I looked at you closely…”

Of course, I had already told them something of my own life and history, how I had missed out on my own generation, how I loved opera and the classic arts, that I was not a snob but I just knew what was better.

But the students didn’t know the full real me.

They didn’t know how I was (still am) part of the outer inner fringe. There again, as we pushed the limits, I was still critical, but at least I was there.

They didn’t know how in Riverside I was Assistant Manager of Stage One, the local Art House Cinema. We showed the entire Janus catalog, and the Criterion Collection.

Those were the days of black and white film, independent cinema, the avant garde trying too hard, Northern Europe offering gratuitous nudity on screen, but clumsily, when they were not comfortable with it at home in their own houses. “I am Curious Yellow,” when I was not that curious and not that yellow.

I had the opportunity to experience a greater exposure (yes, I am aware of the double entendre) than most people ever have in their entire lives. I am no prude.

My students didn’t know this. But they did know I was not “run of the mill.”

So when the subject of Spike Lee came up, I startled they by saying, “Yes, he’s a great film maker. I particularly like his latest film, “She’s Gotta Have it” (which I had just seen at the local Laemmle), they looked at me with renewed respect. I didn’t have to like everything they liked, but they could see that, in many ways that mattered, I was way ahead of them.

When I was still teaching, a student, maybe the one who challenged me about popular culture, had graduated and out in the world and came by with a couple friends to visit and update me on his life.

I said, “You should drop by from time to time to visit your old school.”

He said, “Naah, I don’t think so. There’s nobody here I’d want to visit, except you,” as he dropped by to visit.

I thought, “I’ve taught them all, mainstream and fringe,” and “I should teach as long as I can.”

Which brings me to the real reason for this blog entry. It’s not about gratuitous nudity, especially these days when all constraints are removed and nudity is now all over, in movies, on television, apparently a requirement for success, and they show people “doin’ it.”

It’s about the removal of restraint. It’s about the current chaos, a world I don’t recognize, the loss of truth and history and law and democracy and sanity.

I lived through the final days of Hitler when I was just becoming old enough to understand.

I never dreamed that education, which used to be a basic human right, would so weaken and diminish that the rule of money would trump all else (obvious pun), that books with titles like “Things Fall Apart” were not just a warning but a prophecy.

The list of transgressions is so long that it would cramp my fingers, and burn them at the same time.

I never dreamed that we would have a “leader” who, as I think I wrote in a former blog entry, keeps a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table, ready for someone to read him to sleep.

I never quite realized that entropy is not just a physical force, but a mental one, that nadir (I had a friend named Nadir, no connection) is closer than we think.

I was “corrected” today. The question is not what “we” can do, but what “I” can do.

I know that, whatever it is, it’s not enough.

I have joined marches, participated in sit-ins, written letters, talked to many people, on the street, assistant librarians, waiters and kitchen help in restaurants. Spoiler alert: You may not like either choice presented, but abstaining from voting for “the lesser of two evils” enables the greater evil to win: witness the present.

So, one by one, drop by drop. Teach and clarify. Don’t deny the mistakes of the past, correct them, transcend them.

More blogs that reach out have a cumulative effect.

When you bury your head in the sand, you can’t breathe.

To bring back Helen Caldecott’s phrase (remember her?) (I’ve quoted it before), “We can do no less.”