Another Shop in the Mall

A large boutique opened in our mall last year, maybe the year before, and Micki recently met with the owner to have her books sold from one of the store's many display booths. We drove over to see the display, and as we entered, I had a familiar feeling. Here, I thought, is a somewhat outmoded delivery system for our endless human need to buy things. My senses swirled, and memories of other malls in other places came flooding back. As I settled on a bench to watch the people go by, I realized just how much of my life has had a mall as its setting.

When I was growing up, the Berkshire Mall on the outskirts of Reading was our closest mall. There were countless storefronts, hundreds of places to sit and loiter, and large spaces filled with massive green plants with waterworks interspersed. Except for the enclosed nature of the mall, it could have just as easily been a busy downtown street bustling with shoppers, wanderers, and family members exhausted and looking for a reprieve from endless spending.

Every mall in America once held the same expectations for those who crossed the thresholds. There were hundreds of stores, ranging from book and shoe shops, toy stores, restaurants, places to purchase apparel, jewelry, furniture, knick-knacks, newspapers, coffee or other beverages, to places to gather to eat or to relax or play arcade games.

The shops were arranged up and down both sides of the mall's broad corridors. In the central area, elevators and escalators took one to the second level to access massive department stores situated within the cyclopean shopping center. There were many such emporiums with names like Pomeroy’s, Wanamaker’s, Sears, and JCPenney. The Berkshire Mall also had a few pharmacies and a Woolworth’s in the old days.

Dotted prolifically throughout the concourse were hundreds of free-standing kiosks selling tchotchkes, doo-dads, thingamies, whatyacallums, and hooza-whatsits. There were food vendors galore, and almost as soon as one entered, the scent of baked, fried, fast food, roasted peanuts, soft pretzels, ice cream, sugary drinks, and other treats wafted over you. Beneath it all hovered the potent aroma of buttery movie theater popcorn.

The panoply of sense-shocking, mind-numbing spectacle was more than a little kid could stand. I, like some desert-marooned wanderer, shambled into the marketplace and was quickly overcome. I loved it. As soon as I had wheels of my own, I spent every moment I could at that mall and then branched out to the other malls in the region. Each larger town in the area had its own unique mall. All participated in the same basic rules of mass-market consumerism, but all were laid out differently. At each, I experienced a wondrous variety of shops and stores in an infinitely renewable variation of wonder and desire to spend my money.

The Lebanon Valley Mall, near Schaefferstown, became a hangout for some of my former classmates. We would regularly gather to see movies, hang out at the music store to rifle through CDs and tapes, pester the bookshop clerks, and eat enough sugary foods to overstimulate the combined nervous system of an entire elementary school. Sometimes, after Christmas or birthday cards had been opened and cash deposited, we ventured to other malls, too.

A few miles away in downtown Lancaster was the Park City Mall, which was more vast than the Berkshire Mall and was shaped like a starfish with a huge central hub capped with what looked like a circus tent. Each arm or spoke was full to the brim with all the shops one could imagine. Near Philadelphia, the King of Prussia Mall rivaled them all for size and magnificence.

Proverbs says that a fool and his money are soon parted. Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that when I was younger and regularly went to all the malls, I was that fool. I could always find something I wanted to purchase. Sometimes—who am I kidding?—most times, it was books and comics. I also splurged on music, movies, food, and t-shirts.

When I moved to Asheboro, being a connoisseur of malls, I visited the Randolph Mall (now called the Asheboro Mall) and probably spent too much time and money there, too. Like other malls, it had portals to Sears, Belk, Dillard's, JCPenney, and a movie theater. It was modest compared to the Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro or the more massive shopping experiences to be had in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, or Chapel Hill, but nevertheless had everything that a mall usually boasts, including its denizens, commonly, not to say derogatorily, called mall rats.

Early on, I learned that there are those humans who thrive exclusively within the gravity of a shopping mall. They are regulars, always there from the moment the doors open until stores close and the security guards kick them into the vast parking lots, shouting, “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

There is a perpetual range of misfits and hooligans, lonely (and skeevy) old-timers, jersey-bedecked jocks, overly made-up and scantily clad cheerleader types. There were the overweight and acne-stricken, the nerd, the dweeb, the geek, and the slob. A short guy with tightly braided long hair in a faux leather jacket—a variant of him exists in every mall—talks to his shabby cronies about how he was once an MMA fighter, leading his small band of poorly washed, greasy-haired stick-at-naughts forever in a pageant around the mall, bothering shop owners and clogging up the food court.

Early on in my residency in Asheboro, I got a part-time job in our mall's bookstore. Unlike most of the shops, this place had its own doors to the world that opened earlier and stayed open later than the mall. I used to wonder if any of these mall people ever went home. I secretly believed that some of the ‘mall rats’ actually lived in the walls, behind panels concealing a closed storefront, or precariously balanced in handmade hammocks way up in the rafters. Instead, they just vanish at 9 p.m. and reappear when the mall opens at 10 the next day.

In 2001, Asheboro had a downtown that some ghost towns would have found to be a little too dead. The mall (and the newly completed Walmart Supercenter) were the main hubs of commerce in our small town. I'm glad to say that is no longer true. The downtown is a bustling, thriving, and lively center for food and commerce, and the mall has since begun to fall into the shadow of its former consumer glory.

Now, walking out of the boutique shop and into the wider mall, we see the remnants of shops that are boarded over with neatly painted vistas or photos of families—ironically—outside enjoying nature. Others display enlarged black-and-white pictures of the town's shopping history. Huge swaths where stores once beckoned to shoppers and loiterers are now just wall space.

A few stores remain in operation as I write this. We have a large sporting goods center, our humble movie theater, a Belk department store, a Chick-fil-A, a jeweler, the boutique shop, a few clothiers, and a men's suit retailer. There are several large shoe stores, a smelly bath lotion place, a phone case shop which I swear is a front for some illegal enterprise, a city utility counter to pay water and power bills, the bookstore I briefly worked at, and the Dragon Egg Chinese takeout.

There are a few stores that open to the outside, attached but not accessible from inside the mall. There is a small, perpetually empty arcade, and a host of benches, tables, and cordoned-off areas for queuing (but for what?) are all that remain of a once vibrant shopping experience.

I am of two minds about this. Once a great fan of malls, I now see the benefit that comes from supporting local businesses. When the downtown began to thrive, the mall faltered. It has never regained itself, which implies that the downtown has put down solid roots. Who could lament that?

We have heard promises that one day soon, the mall will be remodeled into an indoor/outdoor format. Whether strictly true or not, I am ambivalent. As I sat there, I was struck by how much the place feels like an airport that is under construction. Not much is going on, except for the people who show up to fill the empty space.

Small packs of people rove here and there. Oldsters do laps. Groups of straggly teenage girls guffaw when older boys walk by on their way to get a slice before the movie starts. A group holds hands in a circle in the central open area, either praying to bring the mall down in a puff of dust, or to keep it up so they can continue to have a place to perform their rituals without being in the weather.

I see a beleaguered mother pushing a double stroller and corralling two toddlers while hollering into her phone. A very young couple gently clasp hands and then nervously look about to see if anyone is watching. Grandpas sit on the benches, looking paunchy, bilious, and fed up. Grandmas with hair like the atmospheres of gas giants gossip around a table by the Chick-fil-A. A little kid is wailing. A security guard is talking to a man with a mop and bucket. A woman with sunken cheeks and feverish eyes barks at her boyfriend, who has a neck tattoo of a female devil and an unwashed mullet.

All of this happens within the air-conditioned safety of our neighborhood shopping mall. There aren't many stores, but the people still gather, wander, hang out, loiter, and live their lives. Behind it all, that deep aroma of buttery popcorn. Over the low-level speaker system, "Drops of Jupiter" by Train is playing. Of course it is. It's the theme of all malls everywhere.

Once a symbol of capitalism, a pillar of the American community, an institution of unbridled consumerism, a festival of food, pop culture, acquisitiveness, materialism, and gangly teenage independence, the American shopping mall is a pale shade of its former glory. As if the organism is breaking up, the parking lot periphery is now full of standalone shops, dentist offices, retail coffee stores, banks, and a Chipotle well away from the infrastructure that once drew thousands per day. Those stores and the businesses downtown now drag people out and away from the mall.

I see an empty building, dank, dark, conduit hanging from once glowing lights, dry fountains, stained rugs, pigeons roosting in the skylights. It is a dim prophecy of a time when all malls are extinct. It might be better that way, but it makes me sad, nonetheless.

Micki walks up and startles me from my deep reverie. “I'm going to get my nails done,” she says, gesturing to a large purple neon sign near where I'm sitting. I nod. “I'll be at the bookstore,” I say.

It's not much, but it is our mall. For now.

Secret Happy Mondays

For years, I have been the beneficiary of a schedule that requires each employee to work a closing shift one day per week. Each one of us comes in at 1 and works until 9 on an assigned day. We only close late Monday through Thursday nights, and my night is Monday.

This might sound unpleasant, especially considering the negative buzz that Mondays get as the first day back after far too short a weekend. Monday mornings for most people are part of the cultural lexicon of unhappy things working people have to endure. The alarm always goes off too early on Mondays. The urge to have a lovely lie in and skip the rat race is at its strongest. Deeply melodramatic feelings of nostalgia for the last two days off develop their own potent emotional gravity. We pine, we long, we ache for Saturday's independence and Sunday's gloriously unfettered lack of office grind.

Well, not for me the unmitigated ballyhoo. While other people are sobbing into their grits facing the new work week, I've already been to the gym, and am sitting in my recliner, feet up with the dogs watching my shows or reading or tapping out my draft for that week's essay. While other people are combing their inboxes for the email that Jane sent at 5 p.m. on Friday or totting up that week's to-do list, I'm shamelessly adding a few hours to the weekend's leisurely respite from the last work week and pleasurably deferring the next one.

When I moved into my current position, more than a decade ago, I was informed that I would be closing on Mondays. Up to that point, Tuesdays had been my night, which was awkward and unpleasant. It was so odd to start the week off normally and then get to have the morning off the next day. Then, after getting home—it always takes me the damnedest time to wind down after a day at work—I sit there staring straight at the ceiling waiting for my eyes to whack closed. So, I gladly accepted the new Monday shift, seeing that lovely extension of the weekend before me like a weekly snow delay to be coveted and enjoyed. Ever since then, I have jealously protected my priceless closing night from others who would pry it from me.

The other nice thing about closing Mondays is that occasionally one gets a respite from the late close shift when a holiday makes for a long weekend. On those weeks, unlike the poor saps who have to close on the other nights, I just get another day off and the rest of the week breezes by. They, meanwhile, have to dread the disruption of the week by having to stay late on Thursday or something.

“Monday, Monday,” sang the Mamas and the Papas, and they had no idea how right they were. But Monday mornings are not all rose petals and cream. We Bares are pragmatic and sensible folk. Rather than take time off work for a doctor or dentist appointment, I have traditionally scheduled these medically necessary events for Monday mornings since I am already off. Like unhappy blips on the radar screen of life, these sparse but no less pressing interruptions of my Monday joy disrupt and dismay.

When the dentist office called to remind me of my biannual cleaning recently, I noted with chagrin and disappointment that I had scheduled the oral torture session at 1030 on a Monday. It was so situated that I didn’t have much time after the gym before needing to be in the cleaning chair. Under other circumstances, this might seem like a pretty good set up. However, things are a little more complicated for me.

I have a genetic heart condition. This requires me to take a strong antibiotic an hour prior to going to see the dentist. Once I have swallowed the horse pill, my innards begin a complicated process of vacating my system of everything I have ever eaten. This can leave me feeling rather like the local farmland gentry are having a hoedown just beneath the belt buckle. So, having chugged the pill with a gallon of water, I started the dicy process of waiting for the signal for me to fly to the loo. This is not a relaxing scenario for my habitually calm Mondays.

A secondary problem arises when it becomes apparent that the dentist's schedule and mine are not aligned. They are thorough and careful with my teeth, of course, but ultimately, I'm always a little pressed for time to get home, change and head off to start the work day. They schedule my time and I'm always early, just in case they're ready, but they are perpetually behind the eight ball. Add to this the Cossacks doing their Russian kick dance in my lower intestines and things can get a little fraught. This last time, I was so unhappily affected by the antibiotic, that I had to scamper straight home after seeing the scheduling lady. I made it just in time. I felt robbed of my usually calm Monday and perturbed about the potency of the medicine.

Then, of course, I had to switch on the bath and have a wash and dress for work. For the rest of that day, I was worn out and more than a little digestively haggard. I also had a sore jaw from having the mandible propped open like a screen door on a cool Autumn day. When I got home that Monday night, I was shattered, a little unwell and more than a little irritable. I lay down and turned my face to the wall. What, I asked myself, is a man to do?

By the time the next Monday rolled around, it felt like the last time I'd had a relaxing pre-work chill was months ago. This could not be borne. What is the point, I asked myself, if I have a morning off and cannot enjoy it? In the depths of that night, while I tottered around the dark house, I had an unusually hot idea. I resolved to take the whole day for the next dentist appointment, so if my innards started giving me the elbow, I could just go straight home and rest. I rarely take a day off for my own health issues, but it seems that when I need them most is on the days I set my appointments.

We Bares pride ourselves on going to work every day. Not for us the almost constant use of sick leave of our younger peers. Being that I hail from the X Generation, I am bound by the vows of that venerable era to go to work regardless of what ails me. Arm off? See you at 9. Cholera? Remember we have that meeting with Jane about that email! I've worked through severe musculoskeletal pain, wounds, fever, colds, the ague, sore throats, roaring headaches and intestinal dysregulation that would make lesser humans fall to pieces. Well, we Bares are not lesser humans. We set our teeth and muddle through. We are about the best through-muddlers there are. My maternal grandfather once paved an entire back porch while one arm was broken in a sling. If I'm not mistaken, he also had a bad toothache. Sterner stuff about sums it up. 

I have for years looked on with something approaching paternal disappointment when my youthful coworkers take their leave because they had a hangnail or split ends or, gods forbid, they needed a mental health day. To show up, even in less than ideal fitness is, for mine and previous generations, a point of deep pride. However, I think that I will take a page from their play books and start using my sick leave, as necessary. I will never be able to just call off because “I just can't quite manage today”. But, anticipating the dyspepsia associated with having to take those dentist meds, I could plan on being out the whole day on a Tuesday or even a Thursday without feeling like I was a malingerer. 

If I take the whole day off, even if I'm feeling like the wreck of the Hesperus, I can get something done around the house and be close to the bathroom as needed. I have built up enough sick time to allow the whole 82nd Airborne two days each with enough left over to “take the cure” for myself for three more months. Best of all, it saves my beloved Monday mornings. 

Could there be anything more wonderful? Four glorious hours between gym and having to step in the rain locker to scrape off the outer crust and don the uniform for work is enough joy for anyone to be getting along with on a Monday. I sit in my chair  joyously imagining my coworkers grunting and sweating under the cruel lash of workaday strain as I scritch our pups behind the ears and yawn contentedly. My work day won't start for ages, I think, as I stare off into the near distance. Life seems like one grand, sweet song.

Those Monday hours are far too valuable for my mental and physical wellbeing to load them up with doctor appointments or other nonsense jotted on my calendar. Nothing will go to pieces at work if I take a day. Even if it does, I'll find out about it when I get in. Its all worth it to save my blessed Monday mornings!

Never Flinch: A Review

Author’s Note: Any time I review a book, I feel that the author might just come across my work in a preliminary search of “what the critics are saying”. If this is the case and Stephen King reads this article, I always like to make sure he knows that I’d read stereo instructions or biomedical information from a pharmaceutical company if he wrote them. While I might be overly critical of Never Flinch in this essay, as an unpublished writer myself, I’ve got no stones to throw. The following is an exercise in literary criticism more than anything else. 

I like reviewing Stephen King books, as it accomplishes two things. It challenges me to write criticism, and it gives me an excuse to burn through his latest novel. Both reward me, if I'm lucky. Sometimes, though, I read a book that doesn't sit right, or feels a little out of tune. Like anyone who knows the notes, can tell when something is off. Stephen King is a national treasure, and we must revere him as such. Though it hurts my heart to say it, his latest book, Never Flinch, was just very okay. As I progressed through the novel, I had the very serious feeling that our Stephen might be losing a step or two. As one of his Constant Readers, it may be that I've been spoiled by so many years of stellar production. Everything he has written for the last two decades or so has been very good. That wasn’t always the case.

In the mid-nineties, King went through a very hard time personally, and his work reflects this fact. He wrote three books (at least) in that period that were dingers. Desperation, Cell, and The Regulators were books that I came back to after a significant hiatus from reading his works, and I felt as though we had lost a genius prematurely. The Master of Horror turned it around, though, and put out some real walk-off home runs after that. The story of his decline is now well-known and extant.

I’ve read almost everything the week it comes out for years, so I read Never Flinch almost as soon as it hit the newsstands. I had high hopes, and honestly, the book wants to be as good a novel as the books that have come before. It wants to be compelling, and it even starts, as one friend put it, with an intriguing premise. By comparison with his last few books, though, it just feels like a rickety puddle jumper rather than his usual F-18. Understand, these are King characters, King ideas and plot lines, even King storytelling, which far surpass others in his field, but I never felt Never Flinch achieves its potential as I had hoped it would, and that feels like a let down.

The story, like so many of King's novels, involves a host of characters, good and bad, all doing different things in different places. At the foundation of Never Flinch, though, is the familiar and now beloved Holly Gibney. Holly is, as King has admitted, one of his favorite all-time characters, which is saying something, based on the entirety of his pantheon.

Holly first appeared in the book Mr. Mercedes, which I have touched on before. In that book, the timid and traumatized wunderkind helps Detective Bill Hodges find a psycho called Brady Hartsfield who is committing mass killings in Buckeye City, Ohio. Holly continues to grow in the two subsequent books of the trilogy, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, then shows up in The Outsider, If It Bleeds, and most recently in her eponymous title, Holly. Never Flinch is Holly's seventh book, and like King has said, she is compelling and fun to read, and unlike any crime fighter in modern fiction.

The latest book finds Holly as the head of the Finders Keepers private detective agency, with the help of Jerome Robinson, another character from the Bill Hodges novels. When a man falsely convicted of possession of material exploitative of children is stabbed to death in prison, a mysterious note appears threatening the deaths of 12 innocents and one guilty person as a means of regaining justice for the murdered man. The note is signed by Bill Wilson.

Immediately, Detective Izzy Jaynes, now a friend of Holly's, is on the case, but soon the bodies start piling up. The only hint is that the name signed on the note refers to Alcoholics Anonymous, which leads Izzy to call Holly to lend her brilliant mind and unique detection skills to the mystery. 

Then the story goes through mitosis and splits into a secondary plot line where Holly winds up on her own adventure, as a bodyguard for a firebrand feminist polemicist called Kate McKay who is on tour through the heartland of the country. McKay and her assistant are being stalked, threatened and attacked by a different but no less dangerous crazy person. Holly heads off to help McKay, while also helping Izzy to discover who Bill Wilson really is before he can murder again.

Another subplot arrives as Barbara Robinson, now a published poet, is invited to sing one of her poems with a mainstream gospel artist called Sista Bessy in Buckeye City. When McKay's venue in the city is bumped to the day before in deference to Sista Bessy, tensions rise, as once again, the city's park and auditorium complex becomes the focal point of the mad men (or women?) looking to gain vengeance with their nefarious plans.

As usual, King's bad guys are fantastically well drawn. Trig, the murderer using Bill Wilson as a pseudonym, is slowly understanding his descent into madness, even though his carefully maintained professional exterior fools everyone for far too long. His internal dialogue, replete with A.A. aphorisms, adds depth to an otherwise one-dimensional baddie who understands at last that murdering people is equally addictive as drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, the other bad guy, a child of the militant religious anti-abortion ideology, has been promising worse harm to McKay and her assistant, Corrie. As the plot advances, the main park in Buckeye City, Ohio, the fictional “Second Mistake on the Lake” becomes the setting for a double-edged climax, as the unknowing citizens, lining up for a strife-filled charity softball game between the city police and firefighters, are moments from a nightmare calamity spurred on by unbridled madness and hatred.

King definitely manages the cast of characters well and adds some of his storytelling magic to liven up the terror. The book is not supernatural (although Holly has certainly faced those kinds of monsters before), but there is an aspect of spine-tingling to it that makes it enjoyable. Like in most of his strictly crime novels, though, King cannot help but reference both the previous real monsters, or hints at his larger universe.

Another writer friend made the point to me that, in the same way that some famous actors want to be rock stars so badly they can taste it, King wants to be a crime novelist, despite his main superpower being the King of Horror. After reading Never Flinch, it has never been more clear how much King admires Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, maybe Elmore Leonard.

Where the book falters is its lack of real oomph. By the middle of the story, as the two plots are converging, the pressure doesn't seem to be adequate to provide the seething tension typical of his usual crime thrillers. Even the characters seem half-hearted, hesitant, doubtful, ambivalent, unnecessarily reflective. Trig acknowledges to himself in a tepid way that he is a serial killer and the bifurcated religious maniac went from compelling to bland. King has some of the most terrifyingly scary bad guys in modern literature, several of whom, like Chet Ondowski, The Outsider, Holly has faced and defeated. By the time everything's coming together at the end of the novel, the story feels wobbly, half-hearted. It never loses its readability, it just seems to fall flat—which for a King novel is saying something. 

After the main events of the novel reach their understated climax, King does a quick hot wash, rounding off and tying up the remaining loose ends, with a hint for another novel coming. Mostly, though, I felt like Never Flinch didn't know what it wanted to do and it left enough of the story unresolved to feel incomplete, sort of truncated.

After the audio version of the book (which was incredibly well-performed by Jessie Mueller) a self-recorded message from Steve to his Constant Readers gives some background notes to what even he acknowledges was a rough one.

After giving his wife, novelist Tabitha King, a draft of the manuscript, she handed it back and told King, “You can do better”. That gave him a smart lash, he admits. But it didn't help that as he was putting down the framework of the story, he was undergoing hip surgery. The surgery and the recuperation process took it out of him and the book suffers as a result. We cannot blame him, mortal that he is, even though his normal output is usually divine.

It is nevertheless a good read and miles better than the next-in-line crime authors one can find scrawling fiction today. King is still a master, he just didn't quite get all of this one. I hope he will keep swinging for the fences in coming years.

One thing that I feel redeems this book and makes me hopeful for the future is Holly Gibney. Holly has finally come into her own. From the small, terrified, bullied, and brow-beaten woman that Bill Hodges first takes under his wing, Holly has spent the interim novels figuring out who she is. Well, she has now arrived. After facing the “It baby” in The Outsider, battling a lesser “It baby” in If It Bleeds, and finally learning how to be fearless as she fights cannibalistic oldsters killing and eating young people in Holly, she is now at her full power and is more formidable than anyone reading Mr. Mercedes could have dreamed.

This most recent book proves that she is now one of King's most considerable characters, up there with Roland Deschain, Danny Torrence, and Andy Dufresne, full of untapped skill and potential. The way she fearlessly faces a bat-swinging would-be attacker in defense of Kate McKay proves that she is now really ready to face something truly terrifying that only King could think of in his next book featuring Holly. I sure can’t wait for that.

If nothing else, Never Flinch makes a good beach read, especially if you don't want to deal with supernatural monsters but are okay with the natural ones. If there is one thing that King's novels prove time and again, he has a unique perspective and a keen ability to make sure we never forget that the real monsters are really within us. That skill remains undimmed. 

I highly recommend Never Flinch because even his less-than-perfect work is fantastic compared to other writers, and if, like me, you're invested in Holly Gibney, then you have to make sure you've read the entire Holly series.

Adventures in Pedagogy

In 2003, having gone back to school and looking to finish my degree in English so that I could become a teaxher, I was hired on as an assistant in the Exceptional Children's Department in our local school system in a lateral entry position. I still remember where I was when the principal called me: the loading dock of our town hospital, where I was working as a cook. The principal told me that I would be working in a “pull-out” classroom, where students in the elementary school would arrive throughout the day to get help with reading, writing, and math. 

That August, the Friday before schools would open for teachers, I went to the director of food services and handed him a note of resignation. I was so excited. I had dreamed of becoming a teacher since my middle school days, and though I wavered early on, as all kids do, deciding what I truly wanted to do professionally, I nonetheless felt as though I was embarking on the first days of a thirty-year career in education. At twenty-six, I could be excused for being both naive and a little too enthusiastic, having no deeper experience with primary education than my own.

The first few months were thrilling. I was helping kids learn to read, and the teacher I worked with, if a little ‘country’, seemed to know her business, at least about getting kids up to speed with their reading. As Christmas rolled around, though, I started to see cracks in the idealistic view of my new career. Things seemed to be going well one day, and the next, everything was not okay.

Most professional jobs have a period of probation, usually sixty to ninety days, where a new employee can, if necessary, be terminated or at least set back on the right path if they have strayed. The place of work and everyone else are on a sort of probation with the new employee as well, when a new hire begins to see reality about their peers, and my eyes had certainly been opened. In those first few months, it was brought home to me just how woefully inept the teacher in my classroom really was. Not only that, but how devastatingly Sisyphean our work was. Every day, we helped kids learn to read, but it was never enough. They were perpetually behind, and no matter how often we got them up to their expected goals, their regular classrooms had already moved on. 

This was only one piece of a series of realizations that shook me. For the next three school years, I labored, like the students, under the delusion that things would get better. If I just kept at it, put my head down and dug in, I would eventually get beyond the breakers. It was not the case. 

Meanwhile, each semester I was also laboring to get my degree, only to find that going part-time was not nearly enough to complete the required hours anytime soon. The oasis of hope that fueled the dream of becoming a teacher was feeling more like a mirage. While we were raising our small family, I was working part-time at other jobs in the summer and evenings, taking classes part-time, and every day facing the unbelievable and unbearable personal and professional problems of my lead teacher. It was all starting to tell on me, I think.

In year four, the director of our department, a diminutive and domineering woman called Dr. Dinah, moved me to another classroom, much against the principal's protests. It was a sort of promotion for which I was grateful, but the job proved to be a step down into the intolerable. I was now well away from the marital and professional collapse of the other teacher, but I had been moved to self-contained functional skills classroom with children who had severe and profound disabilities. 

I didn't mind this at all. Many were nonverbal, most were very young and unable to do much at all except cry and scream when they were unhappy, but, most of the time they were sweet and wonderful. I immediately loved each one of them and worked hard to help them accomplish their goals. My problems were never the kids so much, but with the adults who made things so difficult. The lead teacher was a nice enough and capable person, but her team, of which I was the newest member, was savage and cutthroat at best. At worst, they were a daily nightmare.

Immediately, I was given the most challenging children, forced to take on “bodyguard” roles for other kids with behavioral issues because I was the only male on staff, put in scenarios where I was expected to do the impossible with very little backup, like escort 6 kids to lunch in the main cafeteria by myself, each one of them going in different directions. For four years, I was made use of in these and other humiliating ways, through three school buildings. It was during these second four years that I was assaulted three different times by three different students.

The last of these incidents was the one that set me over my tolerance, though. The child had severe intellectual delays, but her parent allowed her to scamper through the neighborhood in her birthday suit and sent her to school most days filthy and frothing. Part of each week, I was scheduled to work with this child, and little did I know she would be the forecaster of my future.

Lyca (not her name) needed her diaper changed about three times daily.  On the days that I supervised her, I was expected to be responsible for this duty. My predecessor in the position had been accused by a different parent of indecent liberties with their child several years before and had been summarily fired. Despite being exonerated later, this man's life was essentially ruined, and I was absolutely not going down the same path. 

I starkly refused the diaper changing on these grounds, which were well-known if unspoken in the classroom and the school. I was written up for not following directives, but the write-up was soon taken off my record when the school attorney was asked to review the disciplinary action, and they vindicated my assertion that, if there were female staff in the classroom, they were to do the diaper changes as needed. 

Dr. Dinah and the female teachers that I worked with and especially the head teacher of the class were angry at me for this, and it was made clear to me that I was only getting away with my “disobedience” because I was a male. One of my coworkers was a particularly unpleasant person, and she said this to my face one day. In one of the few times in which I was actually able to muster the courage to say what I was thinking in the moment without losing my temper, I responded, “If I were a woman, then this wouldn’t be a problem for me.”

Two weeks after this intense and exhausting battle, Lyca bit me on the hand while we were waiting for dismissal on a bright Friday in mid-May. I was told to go to the urgent care to be treated (she broke the skin). I got a tetanus shot, and had a raft of blood tests, heavy-duty antibiotics. The next week I was directed by the school to go back to the doctor for more blood tests to rule out that I didn’t have HIV/AIDS or any other bloodborne pathogens. This wasn't to verify that I was okay but to make sure Lyca wasn't infected by me. 

No one, not the principal (different from when I started) or her assistant, or any coworkers, asked me how I was or if my hand was okay. After the battle to not change diapers, I had lost the respect of my fellow educators. Meanwhile, I was physically exhausted, mentally drained, and burning out hard, what I got was more crap assignments.

When I reflect on my time in the school system time, now I feel something akin to bitterness. Admittedly, working as a representative of the county government at my public library has healed many of these feelings, but what never really healed was the sense in which I was merely a tool, to be dropped when no longer needed. For eight years I was called to deal with troubled students, or—again, because I was a male—to restrain children who were acting out and a danger to themselves or others. Students frequently ran out of the school doors and out into the surrounding neighborhoods always had me in pursuit, because my job was reduced to a glorified bkuncer for special needs kids. I worked with a fourth-grader who had such violent and vicious tendencies that on more than three occasions, had I not been there, one of his fellow students would have suffered damage to life or limb or worse. 

Every time I felt overwhelmed, under appreciated, exhausted, I would double down remembering my childhood dream to become a full-fledged English teacher. And yet, the more I tried to help, the more I cooperated, the more I put myself in harm's way to make things better for students and staff, the more I found that my stress levels were becoming uncontrollable. I was angry, resentful and felt bullied by an administration that had no concern for me at all. 

When the results of the bloodwork came back clean (as I knew they would), I received a curt email from the new director of the EC department, who made it clear that had the child been infected (even by the student’s bite), I would have been dismissed. In shock, I told Micki that once summer arrived, I would be looking for another job. Luckily, I found one and also, fortunately, I was hired. 

I made an appointment to speak with the principal in late June in 2011. She could barely take her eyes off of her computer when I went to speak with her. We spoke of this and that, but soon enough got down, as I have heard it said, to brass tacks. “So,” I said, signaling that the small talk was over. “Please don’t say that you’re resigning,” she said. If I remember correctly, I laughed right out loud. “That’s exactly why I’m here.” The womans’ face fell so fast that I was startled by the change. I didn’t know if she would cry, but it certainly seemed to upset her. “May I ask why?” “I’ve found employment with the county.” The rest is history. I wanted to say so much more, but to what avail? Me complaining to her wouldn’t have changed how badly I was treated.

But it wasn’t really history. To this day, I carry within me the stress and trauma of those eight, ever-worsening years, as if each year I went down to a new, deeper level of hell. I came away with a mantra response when people asked me why I left. I never had a problem with the kids, even the worst ones. It was the adults, and especially the administration that was intolerable. I have many good friends from those days and I’m grateful to say that will likely not change.

When Micki told me that she was resigning her position with a local nonprofit to start the process of becoming a middle school teacher, I had a relapse of sorts. All my stress came back in a rush of what was for me real PTSD. The thought of starting work again in the schools gave me actual nightmares that I was going back. I muddled through those feelings, perhaps not very well. 

She handled her experience much better than I did and while teaching, she also went back and got her master's in education. She graduated in December of 2024. I've rarely been more proud.

Our career paths in the school systems (our county has one system for our town and one for the county; she worked for the latter) were very different—she taught social studies and language arts. Even so, she experienced much the same systemic problems. That story is hers to tell, but I will say that, rather than changing my mind about the public education system’s raft of problems, her experiences reinforced my feelings of doubt and disappointment. Despite having her master's degree and previous experience, she never got paid anywhere near what she was owed. She spent an enormous amount of money on her students to help them with school supplies. In her three years, she experienced a clear view of how the public education system has failed not just students but our whole society. 

I’m pleased to say that, as of this writing, she is working in a different field, still in education, but not as a teacher or administrator, and she is, it is obvious, much happier. Again, that’s her story to tell. The only time I was ever happier for her, in terms of her career choices, was on the day that she came home from her last day of school, never to look back with the promise of a better job in front of her.

When I was a kid, I admired my teachers deeply. It is safe to say that they made an incredible difference in my life. One of my middle school teachers is someone I still have fairly regular contact with, thirty years later. I’m the man that I am partially because my teachers gave a damn about me. 

Micki gave more than a damn about her students and I know she made all the difference for some of them. Like me, she said it wasn’t ever the kids that were the problem. It was a structurally flawed administration from the superintendent to the school staff. The disease has traveled far, though. It now comes from the US Capitol and trickles down to the students in the schools near you. 

I have no solution to this, except to say that, as for me and my family, we won’t ever work in the school system again. There are other ways to participate and aid education. And, my heart goes out to those friends and former colleagues who, despite the horrors, continue to go back year after year and face the nightmare. There are good schools, good principals, and good teachers, but the system is failing now, and likely beyond hope.

I wrote this essay because, as a former educator, I’m one of the lucky ones. I got out while there was still time. No parents accused me of harming their children, thus ruining my reputation forever. I have scars. As I said, I’m not one to hold resentments, at least not since I got sober, but in the years since my nightmare ended, I’ve never been able to shake the bad feelings I have for the people who failed me and failed my family as a result. I wasn’t a perfect employee. No one ever is. I had a lot of growing and learning to do, but I was willing to do it. Instead, I got run through the meat grinder. As I put these final words down, I am witnessing a power structure in our local schools become a serious cult of personality rather than an organization for teaching kids. It is more of the same. I’m glad Micki got out when she did! My heart goes out to her friends and colleagues—and our family members—who stay every day and fight the good fight.

Midnight Ramblings

It is dark, the temperature is cooler outside. Things are quiet. Traffic nearby has slowed or vanished. Nothing, as the Christmas poem says, is stirring. Except me. Almost every night, around the witching hour, regardless of where I am or what I'm dreaming about, I am cast up from the depths of sleep into wakefulness like Jonah being “vomited out onto the dry land” of Nineveh by the great fish. I have no idea why this is. We’re in bed most nights by 9:30. Sometimes earlier, rarely later. Even on nights when we get home late and it’s eleven when we turn in, I still come kareening out of sleep at midnight.

It's not completely accurate to suggest that I'm merely waking up a bit. No, in fact, I come awake with a rush, almost as if I have been woken by some alarm or loud nocturnal disruption. I fly up out of bed, step into my house shoes, and quietly sneak out of the bedroom, hoping not to disturb Micki or our pups, and take a stroll around the house, checking doors, peeking out windows, and grumbling under my breath at this weird habit. The tendency usually ends with me having a handful of crackers or some other light snack, a sip of water, and then heading back to bed, where I spend several minutes trying hard to get the Bare blood pressure back to within appropriate sleeping tolerances.

Once, a few weeks ago, at about the same time that I would normally spring awake, a siren blared out front and, gazing through the windows, I noted a police car, it’s electric blue LED lights flashing frenetically, and a hapless driver, going through the rigamarole of a traffic stop quite literally just down the front walk. That really snapped my heart rate into high gear, and it was several quarters of an hour before I calmed down enough to drift back into the serene dreamless. Otherwise, the only disturbance to wake me comes from within. I have spent many a midnight pondering my odd behavioral tick. It has become a bit of a legend in our home, too.

Several years ago, now, when all the kids were staying with us in the unhappy wake of the pandemic, they would remark that the house was haunted. They claimed to see a “shape” wandering around the house, or they would hear doors close or floors squeal under silent tread. They said that there was a restless specter roaming the halls and corridors of our estate. As much as to quote Hamlet's injunction to the ghost of his murdered father unintentionally, they would say—and I’m paraphrasing here—, “rest, rest perturbéd spirit”. I scared them several times as they came down or over (as the case was) to raid the fridge, the larder, or the pantry. I was just sitting there, mournfully munching on leftovers or whatever was available. They would scream, I would feign fright just to take the edge off of the embarrassment, and then I would shuffle off to bed and lie there until the kitchen was quiet again, and then head back to scoop ice cream or chew on meatloaf.

I am sitting here writing this in the depths of the middle night, “This is thy hour, O soul,” as Walt Whitman wrote, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is that makes me wake at this time and come “fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.” It’s not like I set an alarm for it, and many nights I participate in a partisan argument with myself to let me sleep undisturbed, which is what I would like to be doing right now. Instead, I’m in the kitchen, leaning on our counter, munching on crackers and drafting this essay.

I have memories of Pop Bare being up at night, snacking like this, too. He was forever checking the outdoor lights, the door locks, making complicated snacks from various leftovers, and generally hovering in the kitchen at all hours, looking out the windows and wandering about. I can still see him, leaning on the counter, using his peanut butter-laden knife to snag another Ritz cracker from a pile and asking me why I was still up. If I inherited it from him, then I now at least understand why he was up. Whatever it is that wakes us, though, remains a mystery.

I will admit that I have had some truly peaceful moments at midnight. There is something about this dark world when your house is ninety years old. The floors creak and, if you're dedicated, you soon learn which parts make the loudest groans. Other than the timed lights, the house is wrapped in gloom, draining the otherwise brightly colored rooms to shades of grey. The usual scents of flowers, plants, cooking, or baking are gone, replaced by the odor of oiled wood and old books.

Sitting at our kitchen counter with my head propped in my hands, I have sometimes thought that one of the echelons of our venerable ancestors had a job as a night watchman, or drew lots to stand the midnight post upon the chilly battlements. Maybe some unlucky member of a prehistoric tribe or clan had the incredible misfortune to watch the family group as they slept and snuggled, clutching a staff or spear and hoping that the saber-tooth cat wouldn't approach until someone else’s turn to play guard duty. Whatever causes me to blast awake, it must come from some very deep biological imperative, born from eons of necessity and habit. I get this, of course. There is a natural and respectable urge to keep the cubs safe and make sure their mother’s sleep is unperturbed.

When the boys were small, I really did feel a kind of sudden and implacable watchfulness creeping in my veins at night that is most closely associated with a biological imperative. I often heard them cough or groan or whimper or get up for water or to use the potty in the deep watches of the night. I also heard our beloved Trixie growl or whine in her sleep from her bed in the kitchen. When Evan was still quite a little chap, he would sometimes sleepwalk. I caught him a few times and urged him back to bed without waking him. Once, I heard the hall shower switch on and was able to stop him from stepping into the scalding spray in his full sleeping togs. He mumbled something about cereal, and I ushered him to bed and covered him back and stood sentinel until I was sure he was back to sleep, my heart playing a country jig behind my sternum.

Eventually, though, sleep comes back to me, and suddenly, as if shot with a tranquilizer dart, I start to slump and my eyes droop. Then, avoiding the creaky and squeaky parts of the floors, I check the doors, peer out the front windows, and take in the silent and shadowy surroundings before heading back to our room. I scuttle back to our bed, quietly kick off my house shoes, and settle in next to Micki and gently try to get comfy without shaking things up too much. I must fall back to sleep hard, because I rarely wake again unless my bladder is full or our geriatric pug cries to go out. 

Until the alarm wails, I’m usually dead to the world, as the saying goes. These last few nights, I have taken my phone off the charger and brought it with me on my midnightly perambulations to jot down the odd things that come to me in the murk of the smallest hour. Whatever it is that wakes me, whether ancient habit or something more prosaic, I have spent countless midnights just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, floating about our old house unseen by most, rambling for reasons that I may never understand until sleep comes back to me. And as I write these last words, I feel the pull of slumber on my bones. I’ll say good night.

The Groundskeeper’s Lament

Join me, won’t you, on a leisurely stroll through my neighborhood. You’ll see craftsman style homes, some Cape Cods, some others strewn through leafy streets. Almost every home has a verdant yard, every yard an oak, maple, or dogwood, every flowerbed dazzling with hostas and shaped hollies. We’ve just missed the best part of the year, as all the irises and azaleas have bloomed already. There may be some day lilies and hydrangeas, though, and there are dinner plate-sized magnolia blossoms, like giant white stars in a shining dark green night of glossy leaves. 

If we take a closer look, though, amid all the greenness is a strange and insidious growth. Virginia creeper is slowly spreading its tendrils across the beautiful mulch under the front windows. Wild grapes are flourishing over the buttery gardenias. Invasive species, like privet and Chinese wisteria, pop up everywhere, not to mention volunteers of the more hardy trees, like elm and maple, and cedar. You’ll notice mulberry, too, if you wander around the natural areas, and poison ivy and mimosa, and liriope grass. There is wild yam (also a vine) and many other kinds of green things that are slowly taking over, covering, sprouting, trailing, creeping, and proliferating. Almost as soon as the temperature rises daily above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the world and our neighborhood and our yard come to life with an army of plant life of wondrous assortment that refuse to be culled, plucked out, torn down, mowed, trimmed, pruned, shaped, dug up, burned, or sprayed. 

The irony of plant life is that we have obvious and blatant double standards regarding them. This past weekend, I spent two days carving into the lush growth, just to get some of our yard back. Without concern for getting enough water or sunlight, these ancient growing things extend three feet in just one day, while we spend our time plucking weeds in our garden and watering, just to make sure that our tomatoes, peppers, and herbs keep growing. The plants we want seem precarious and delicate, and finicky. The plants we don’t want can survive an eight-week drought, a nuclear winter, and still come back strong enough for me to have to go out and cut them back again. 

While griping copiously as I mowed, I noted that about 1/3 of our yard is dedicated to what my father-in-law called “natural areas”. Mainly, these natural areas are beneath our numerous magnolia trees. Unlike other deciduous trees, magnolias tend to be a little bit backward in their treeish schedules. When other trees are newly jade green in spring, the magnolia is beginning to cast off its huge, glossy leaves, which are thick and heavy, in preparation for its massive blossoms. In late summer, when other trees are bearing fruit, the magnolia drops its large cone-like seed hulls, which look for all the world like fragmentation grenades and quickly dull my mower blades.

This is forgivable, if you’ve ever smelled a magnolia blossom, you’ll know it is one of the best natural scents in the world and speaks to deeps within me that remind me of ancient summers long before humans walked in this part of the world. As the magnolia leaves clatter down, they land on an incredibly shallow root system, which makes mowing a real pain. I long ago decided to let the leaves just fall and cover the ground under the trees with crackling leaf litter. Most things are deterred by the heavy leaves, but some invasive species still grow up in those natural areas, and so, even in the twilight gloom under the magnolia's evergreen boughs, I have to spray and cut, to make sure the ivies and the creepers and privet don’t take over. 

I sometimes imagine myself like Macbeth, as he listens to the messenger tell him, 

“As I did stand my watch upon the hill,

I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought

The Wood began to move.”

In the Scottish play, this is a tale of doom for Macbeth, since the witches at the beginning told him that he would be king until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Little does he know that his enemies have cut tree branches to camouflage their advance to lay siege to his castle, signifying his end. But on a quiet day, when the birds are ducking the midday sun, I swear I can hear the vines and creepers whispering through the undergrowth and the faint keening of woody junk plants stretching under our decks. 

I work forty hours a week. When I get home, until we have dinner and clean up, it is time to think of getting ready for the next day so that we can get to bed early enough to make the next morning bearable. Our weekends are often busy, too. Whether we are off to book signing events or to visit the kids, or if we are hoping to grab lunch in our favorite cantina, downtown, then grocery shopping, or running weekend errands, doing laundry, cleaning the house, or just shattered from a very busy and dauntingly packed week, I sometimes just don’t have enough time to spend in the yard and grounds. 

Most years, I can find at least one or two days a week to get out and get ahead, but this last year has been busier than normal and more fraught with commitments. I had a good handle on the end-of-summer chores last year, and was feeling good about it, when Hurricane Helene came hurtling across our state’s western region, shunting our kids from their house to ours, from late September to late January. During that time, we were trying hard to make our home welcoming for our son and his wife and daughter, especially when he had to go back to their house during the week. We got to spend a lot of time with the baby, but it necessarily cut into yardwork time. Not that I minded, of course. Given the chance to be raking and mowing up leaf litter and sitting watching music videos and reading to the little bit, I’d choose the latter every time and twice on Thursday.

Somehow, though, after the kids were able to get home (it took four months for their Internet to be hooked up, in the daunting aftermath), we needed some time to deal with the poignant pain of missing them and transitioning back to our previous routine. Then, too, our eldest opted to move into where the other kids had been staying during the fall and winter, so there was a secondary transition. By my birthday, when I usually take a week off to get caught up on the grounds in preparation for summer, we were settling back into our quiet routine again. Except this year, instead of a week at my birthday, as usual, I opted to take the same week off as the local school system’s spring break, so that we could spend it together without really going anywhere. As glorious as that week was, though, instead of getting the yard and pool sorted, I spent it gamboling around town with my bride. Again, given the chance, I’d pick the latter every time. The green and growing things took full advantage

April streaked by and May is now waning and only by dribs and drabs have I been able to get anything close to caught up. This past weekend, plans we made were changed and so I was able to spend two whole days getting things reckoned with and uncovering the pool, but I still have so much to do. Soon, we’re headed to celebrate the long Memorial Day weekend with our kids in the mountains, and so, more time will slip by without a shred of work getting done at our house.

I say that, but our eldest has take real pride this year and tidied up a lot in the courtyard, which was a huge help and his talent for seeing things in 3D before the job is done, made taking the cover off the pool 99% easier than when I’ve had to do it myself in previous years. Nevertheless, even with a squad of helpers and the best tools, it would take me most of June to get things where I would like them.

Pop Bare says, “The grass will always have to be mowed.” It’s true enough. Just like a haircut, my vibrant, viridian lawn which looks neat and even, will soon be, to use the Pennsylvania German word, strubbly once again. No matter how many times I pull down and cut away the English ivy or the Virginia creeper from under my front windows, I’ll have to do it again. This year was somewhat off kilter and enjoyably so, but it won’t matter in the long run. Slowly, while I’m working at the library or visiting the kids, or just taking a much needed stroll with Micki to our favorite downtown haunts, the growing things will be making slow, almost silent inroads, like the sentient, carnivorous monster plant in a thriller I recently read. 

Someday, whether or not I am still as healthy and springy as I am now, I will have to hire a yard company to come out and deal with our grounds. I’ve watched one-by-one as our older neighbors have succumbed to the cookie-cutter landscaping that is the equivalent of a dollar store makeover. I will buy a riding mower sooner than give up the right to plan my own grounds. We Bares are stubborn and full of pride.

Though I will say that as I mowed recently, I was envisioning something along the lines of a vast English gardens in our North Yard. Instead of an acre of green grass, I imagined cutting the rectangle up into a series of beds, with swaths of paving stones between them and very little, if any grass present. I would plant yarrow and obedient and black-eyed susans and towering cone flowers and creeping flox, and every other kind of flowering beauty, so that, as the year progressed from early spring to late fall, something would always be blooming. It would mean less mowing, more love to our pollinators and a heaping helping of pretty for those passing through. We could even put a nice bench or a swing out there, or a table and chairs, so we could read and enjoy the beauty (if it isn't too hot).

Alas, none of that is happening soon. Not for lack of trying, but because until we’re both pensioners ourselves, there just won’t be any time. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to keep more than a fingernail-hold on my outdoor chores and endeavor to reawaken my previous dedication to keeping things a little neater than I have this past year. 

The Wet, Steamy Car Windows of Modern Belief

Author’s note: Part of this essay comes from a paper written for a college class, and I’ve taken that topic and worked it into a newer form. Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper had a sheep problem, but in my own paper, I reworked it to make it a bit more palatable to modern eyes and brains, and my professor said that he felt Gettier would approve. Thanks to Edmund Gettier, I find myself considering sheep (or sheepdogs, as the case may be) a lot, as you will see, and thanks to my long-suffering professor(s) that last year of my undergraduate work, who helped me to feel confident enough to build on the shoulders of an epistemological giant. The following amalgam is also somewhat dependent on Malcolm Gladwell’s recent Revisionist History podcast episode called The RFK Jr. Problem.

Generally speaking, I trust science to provide better answers about the world than anything else. There’s a place for intuition, supposition, hypotheticals, educated guesses, of course, but science does the hard work of having to prove its positions and show its work. This doesn’t make science omniscient or always perfectly true. There’s still a lot out there that we don’t fully understand. Some of those things are foundational, like how life started on this planet, or what consciousness is, or how we explain sentience, and although we might take scientific fact as being more or less the epitome of verifiable truth, we must still be skeptically confident only, remembering that science often paves over its previous work as new things are discovered and new technologies grant us access to deeper secrets. 

I have long been a supporter of the idea that, where science fails, or has been unable to fill the unfilled gaps, philosophy takes over. Even philosophy cannot do all the work, but we know more now than we did when we were first spreading across the world as nomadic wanderers. And yet, we rarely stop to acknowledge what we don’t know and how those gaps are much more illustrative of our species than what we do know.

In the overarching realm of philosophy, the study of what we know is called epistemology, and within the framework of this topic, one of the most fascinating discussions was conducted by 20th-century philosopher Edmund Gettier. In a 1963 paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge, Gettier describes a problem of observation in which someone can be justified in thinking something is true and yet still not truly know if what they have observed is real. His several scenarios can be teased out into what are now called the Gettier Problems, where the breakdown of perception and observation is designed to point out the frailties in our system of observation and our desire to know things.

One of my favorite examples of a Gettier Problem involves a sheep and a sheep dog, though, in this case, with respect to Mr. Gettier, I’ve put my own spin on it. A father and son are driving on a rainy country road; the father is in the front seat and the son is in the back. Out of the foggy, wet windows, the green country speeds by. They pass a white object on the driver’s side of the car. The father believes that it is a sheepdog. The son believes that it is actually a sheep. Both father and son have seen the white creature, and both come to different conclusions. All the predicates for both things to be true are there, and it is reasonable to assume that both parent and child can trust their perceptive faculties. The next step would be to ask if either the father or the son was justified in believing what they thought they saw out the rainy, steamy windows. We would probably say yes. 

Both are justified in believing what they saw, making this a justified true belief (JTB), but how can they know what they think they saw is factual if they keep driving? One of my classmates hilariously suggested that the father turn the car around to prove his son either right or himself wrong, or vice versa. This pragmatic suggestion got a general laugh, but also struck me with a secondary problem within the thought experiment. At what point is it the responsible thing for the father and son to sit down and decide how they want to get to the root of the problem?

I could be accused of taking Gettier’s otherwise thought-provoking problem too far by adding the moving vehicle and the rainy windows, but I couldn’t help inserting a layer of ethics into the scenario, either. In real life, we rarely know (or choose to believe) things without an aspect of ethical grounding, even if we ultimately choose to ignore it.

In the modern world, we are confronted with Gettier problems all the time; though the scenarios are more varied (and reflected upon less). Many topics within the framework of public discourse wind up being not much better than the wet, steamy windows in my version of the Gettier thought experiment, and our access to information is such that we can feel as though we are justified in believing something or thinking that it is true and yet having no real ability to ascertain effectively whether it is actually so. The human faculty for certainty without or only partial evidence has been taking performance enhancers of late. When we liberally fold this abject certainty into the admixture, doubling down on our possibly justified true belief, we become guilty of an epistemological infraction and an ethical one. 

To better illustrate this, I will further maim Gettier’s original sheep/sheepdog problem and morph it to fit modern epistemological problems. Instead of a car on a rainy day, though, we will take a slightly more nefarious topic and a slightly more dangerous scenario than a wet country drive through sheep country. 

A few weeks ago, someone I know posted a meme on social media. The topic of this post made them quite angry, and they shared it not only on their feed but also sent it to the direct message platforms of their friends. In this post, the creator (who was not the person who shared it) claimed that a rotavirus vaccine called RotaTeq was killing way more infants than the public knew about. Almost all newborns get the RotaTeq vaccine, and infant mortality rates due to the rotavirus have decreased drastically since then. All the person sharing online saw was that a vaccine was killing babies, and they became incensed enough to share it vigorously.

Immediately, I was dubious. Not only because this post came from the Internet, but also because here was an example of a carefully wrapped but still overtly anti-vax propaganda. I knew, for example, that the RotaTeq vaccine for infants has been in the sights of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years, mainly because he believed that the doctor who created the vaccine stood to get kickbacks if the CDC found the vaccine efficacious in stopping a deadly infant virus. Although the post did not explicitly invoke RFK Jr., I could see that whoever created the meme that this person was sharing was probably in the pipeline of information promoted by Kennedy and his league of anti-vaccine supporters.

Checking back across the rest of their posts for the last few years, it seemed to me that the person who shared this post was an otherwise reasonable and rational human, not usually prone to conspiracy theories or propaganda. They had taken this idea at face value and got upset by its claims. They saw a situation where blind faith in medicine and science was killing babies while the pharmaceutical companies raked in dough. What the meme was claiming could seem possible, even reasonable, in our nation today. For us, with a young granddaughter, it might be downright terrifying to think that a big corporation would allow a dangerous or deadly vaccine to be put on the market and get the government to legally require it, thus putting our little one in harm’s way. I also know, as most people do, that things are rarely this simple or clear-cut.

The Internet and social media platforms are very much like the steamy and rain-drenched windows in my version of a Gettier problem. We see something that appears real, true, and we might even say justified, based on the limited information that we get, and feel certain about it at first glance. Reading this post might even justify believing it because it feels true. In the modern day, we cannot, like our father and son duo, simply take these things without further analysis and drive on. Too much is at stake in the Internet Age. We owe it to ourselves and to society to take much more care in getting to actual knowledge.

Despite what the post claimed, RotaTeq has saved millions of babies worldwide from the devastating dehydration of diarrhea from infant rotavirus. Before its invention, babies were regularly dying, and medical officials were powerless to stop it. Just one vaccine has saved countless lives. Multiple vaccines are required for infants today, all of which prevent otherwise devastating diseases and death. As I mentioned, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is against the RotaTeq vaccine and has recently accepted a cabinet post as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

In his book, called The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. falsely inflated the number of children who died as a result of taking the RotaTeq vaccine, but he also claims that vaccines generally aren’t necessary or are dangerous or cause other horrible diseases. Famously, he claims that childhood vaccines cause autism, which isn’t even a disease. In Texas, where RFK’s anti-vaccine ideology has taken hold—dare I say become contagious—we are currently watching a potent strain of measles reach nearly epidemic proportions, killing people who refused to get the measles vaccine or have their kids vaccinated, likely because of RFK’s influence and stance, assuredly because someone so prominent is feeding the ideology.

This is where the breakdown between a justified true belief and verifiable facts can cause serious and deadly issues. The person who posted this nonsense online might have been reasonable to assume that there are dangerous side effects for some vaccines. They missed an essential step in their process when they shared the meme without checking the facts first. 

When we claim certainty without verification, we can very quickly cause serious trouble for others who are equally unlikely to check the facts before sharing. To strain the viral metaphor further, when we spread nonsense online without verifying it first, we become a vector for a virulent strain of credulity and ignorance that has actually reached pandemic levels in our nation. The nature of social media is to get us to spread things without verification, but even before social media, this wasn’t a new problem.

If we take a closer look at his work, we see that one of RFK’s articles about vaccines had to be retracted, largely because fact-checkers were able to prove that his work was based not on the efficacy of the vaccines, but on conflict of interest and corruption at the pharmaceutical level and on information that he either willfully or mistakenly got wrong. This hasn’t stopped him from making similar claims about other vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, the measles vaccine, and others on podcasts, at the podium of his official role, or in his many books. 

I’m not inoculated against RFK Jr. and his anti-vax nonsense, of course. I could just as easily be one of the millions who take his word for golden truths because he appears to be an expert (even though he is undoubtedly not one). Rather, my own position is a simple but very effective one developed over the years: I don’t believe a thing that RFK Jr. says about anything. I don’t believe a thing any “expert” says about anything until I look up whether or not their claims are verified. This isn’t a universal position, of course. Some people are more believable, whose work is verified and vetted long before it ever reaches my eyes and ears. Some people actually do the work before they put things out there. Generally, though, if it elicits a strong emotion, comes with a heavy dose of political or religious ideology, or participates in any number of logical fallacies, I ignore it.

I am immune to RFK Jr’s attempts to drag people into fear of vaccines because the man is a lawyer, not an epidemiologist, and because most of the things he says are patently false. If Rolling Stone has to retract an article, it’s not likely that the facts are being sought in the composition. This is my position for almost everything that comes from the current administration, but also from the Internet. If we take the position that all of it is false until proven factual, we might not actually be so quick to share it just because it seems true, or because we are cynical, overwhelmed, afraid, having an emotional response, or because something is intentionally composed to agree with our biases. I tend to doubt something because I might feel tempted to agree with it when I see it online.

Perhaps ironically, when family or friends would approach me about things that they “read online” about the previous administration which flipped them into a rage of righteous indignation and I didn’t lose my mind with them, they would give me odd looks. When the same or worse things occur in this new administration and they aren’t equally upset, I have to wonder if the main point of the Internet Age is to get us all to be willingly stupid and moral relativists. 

My position is considered unreasonable by the people who believe RFK Jr. (et. al.). Maybe they are motivated to accept his claims because of his lineage, or because he is the nation’s top health officer, or because he is aligned with a particularly virulent strain of ignorance and moral imbecility that seems to appeal to the American political realm.

When I wrote my final paper for the epistemology class about the Gettier Problems, I added the bit about the moral necessity of finding facts to justify our beliefs. My point was that until the father and son go back and test their justified true beliefs, the thing they see can only exist in a kind of paradoxical unity where the object is both and neither a sheep or sheepdog. I got an A. 

I find that the problems that Edmund Gettier published in his paper are much more practical and realistic than just the interesting and diverting discussions about what we think we know. A potent parasitic code has crept into our critical faculties and caused us to believe things not because they are true, but because they agree with our political or religious affiliations or stir up strong emotions (or all of the above). We assume that because someone is on “our side” of the chasm of civil debate and social culture that we must believe in them no matter how ridiculous their claims are. This mindset has polarized our nation and is the equivalent of the father and son stopping the car and having a knife fight to decide who was right about what they thought they saw. Except in that case, neither of them was right, making the fight all the more useless and tragic, and hopeless.

There are many known unknowns and much that we have left to learn about the world. There are some things that we can never know. This is the nature of epistemology and of human experience. However, we have a moral responsibility to make sure that the information we put out into the world is not only verifiable but also more than just a justified true belief. We have to do the work, or else people who cannot tell the difference will get the wrong end of the stick and cause way more than just a polite argument about what’s knowable; it will be the thing that tears our society and our world apart.

Author’s Further Note: Because this is an essay about citing one’s sources, I’ve compiled a bibliography of sorts on the topics discussed herein. You may find them below.

Epistemology and Gettier Problems

1. Wikipedia: Epistemology
   
   

2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epistemology
   
   

3. Encyclopedia Britannica: Epistemology
   
   

RotaTeq Vaccine Safety and Efficacy

1. Merck Vaccines: Safety Profile of RotaTeq
   
   

2. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Rotavirus Vaccine Safety Brief
   
   

3. ScienceDirect: "Social media use and vaccination among Democrats and Republicans: Informational and normative influences"
   
   

Vaccine Misinformation and Social Media

1. Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health: "Vaccine Misinformation Outpaces Efforts to Counter It"
   
   

2. Science (AAAS): "Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on COVID-19 vaccine uptake"
   
   

3. CDC: Vaccines & Immunizations – Myths and Misinformation
   
   

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vaccine Claims

1. Rolling Stone: "Deadly Immunity" (archived)
   
   

2. Salon: Retraction of "Deadly Immunity"
   
   

3. NPR: "Fact Check: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Vaccine Claims"