Anxious Am I?

A Pseudo-Memoir with Some Fiction and a Bit of Truth

Alan A. Block

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666793338
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Following a lifetime rooted in family, schools, culture, and psychotherapy, provoked by the query of a daughter concerning the presence of anxiety in my life, this memoir pursues the presence of anxiety in life and seeks in some context for the concerns with which the author has lived for three-quarters of a century. In the reflections from these situations and influences, he works his way back to stories of personal origin and growth. He has sauntered through persistent issues with which he has been engaged throughout his life, and he has made a few pronouncements, some of which might even ring true. Within these pages, a little wisdom may even be found. And hopefully, with some love and concern, he has responded to the challenging question, "Do you have anxiety?"

Before the Masts

good trouble, small rebellions

John Lewis, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2020 after a lifetime of civil rights activism and public service, and who from 1986 served as a member from Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, urged citizens to engage in what he referred to as “good trouble.” I think that by good trouble Lewis meant that which is undertaken in pursuit of a more just society. Good trouble is a necessary trouble. Lewis urged, “When you see something that is not right, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.” Good trouble is action in the pursuit of freedom; freedom was not a final destination but an act. He said, “Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an ever more fair, more just society.” I think that good trouble occurs from a belief in the possibility of a society where the measure of a person’s worth is not dependent on money, or skin color, or gender or sexual preference; good trouble fights against inequality and against domestic and foreign oppression.

I don’t know what catalyzed my belief in good trouble: perhaps it was the assassination of President Kennedy which introduced into my consciousness the existence of evil in world; perhaps it was my growing awareness of the civil rights movement and the violence that ensued and that led to the murder of four young girls in the cowardly bombing of the Birmingham church. I had been raised in a wholly segregated intentionally white environment. Perhaps I was horrified by the shooting of Medgar Evers and the beatings of the Freedom Riders and the marchers across the Edmund Pettis Bridge; perhaps it was my developing horror at the structural inequalities built into societies and especially that of the United States; perhaps it arose from my immersion in folk music that often spoke of social injustice and the necessity of good trouble that had been already undertaken and that which was still to come. Or perhaps it was the developing sense that things were not right in my home and that to maintain a semblance of order I had had to suppress my dreams. There was there no space for happiness, no notion even that happiness should be sought for and hard-won. Certainly, in my home I experienced no freedom: I had been trapped in their nightmares. But out there I saw that there were people doing what Lewis would call good trouble, and I thought that I might become a part of some movement that was so engaged. I could disrupt and maybe realize some freedom.

I was not conscious during high school and college of engaging in anything that approached the actions of good trouble; then I might have characterized my behavior as merely rebellious, but mostly I was trying to keep from drowning. Mine were small rebellions. I was oxymoronically a cautious rebel: I frequented the coffee houses where socially conscious and political active folk music played, but I avoided attending with Sharon Reinhart and Sandy Wasserman the venues where played the Rolling Stones. Once the two returned from a concert in possession of what they said were T-shirts given to them by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. I enviously imagined how they had acquired those prizes! I wore the buttons but hadn’t the authority or the courage to ride the buses. I read Do It! and Revolution for the Hell of It, but I didn’t actively join any movement nor really engage in anything that could be known as good trouble. But I began to slowly recognize that there might be a difference between the trouble that I thought was in me and that made me as I thought disagreeable, and the trouble I could cause because I was all right and could engage in doing something true and moral. I read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and studied Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. I read everything I was assigned and more! I adopted existentialism as a personal philosophy and understood the absurd as reality. I began to understand that I could be disagreeable and not only in opposition to an unjust society and in the service of justice and social equality, but also in the assertion of personal release and freedom from my family and culture of origin. When I joined my parents at their dinner tables loud and rancorous arguments took place about almost everything. I accepted a moral obligation to right some wrongs and cause good trouble and I wanted my independence from their lives. I began to rebel in greater ways against my parents, my school, and my government. At some later point I joined the Marxist Society and there studied Capital with Michael Harrington. It took years for that rebellion to finally birth a man; I think that I am still busy being born.

I think about the kid in Buddy Mondlock’s song who admits, “I’m the kid who has this habit of dreaming/Sometimes gets me in trouble too.” I have learned the habit of dreaming, and at least one thing that I learned from my dreams was that sometimes the product of my dreaming could lead to an engagement in good trouble. At the beginning I was not terribly brave and I marched to the beat of someone else’s steadfast drum, but a moment did finally arrive when I felt compelled to do something that was not familiar to me. At the time, and it remains so even still, my world was the school and in study, and it was there that eventually I undertook to engage in what I might now call good trouble. In November 1969, two months into my first teaching position, on an early Friday morning, I called in sick so that I could travel to Washington, D.C., and join the November March on Washington. I think now that this was a small move into the public world of protest. I had spent much of my college years with my fraternity brothers considering ways to avoid the draft: allergy shots, physical disabilities, mental illnesses of all sort. Now I felt compelled to go to Washington, to carry the name of a soldier killed in Vietnam to the coffin set before the White House—shout his name out loud, we were advised— and to march the next day along Pennsylvania Avenue in a show of mass protest. Sayville, where I taught, was a conservative district despite its proximity to Cherry Grove, the gay community on Fire Island. Sayville’s politics supported the war.

I wasn’t at all sick but perhaps I was getting well. I remember the phone call I made immediately after arising in the morning hoping to sound desperately ill and being terribly worried that the ruse wouldn’t work. I think that in those days we had to actually speak to a live person and probably it was the principal, Mr. Limouze, to whom I moaned and rasped. I thought I might have been convincing, but then the black arm band and buttons declaring the war unjust that I wore after that weekend might have suggested otherwise. Also suspect was my refusal to lead my homeroom class in the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Perhaps the last straw occurred at a high school basketball game when I and the newly hired and long-haired math teacher, Jeffrey Wasserman, chose not to stand for the national anthem. Behind us were sitting two board of education members. At the end of the year I was informed that my contract would not be renewed. My evaluations thus far had been exemplary, and so I wondered aloud why I was being fired. The principal, Mr. Limouze, looked at me disdainfully and said, “Think about it.” I have thought long about it since then.

Dreaming does sometimes get me in trouble. After Sayville and unemployment and a carefully executed failure at my draft physical exam, I accepted an unfortunate position in my father’s clothes factory making very inexpensive ladies and children’s wear. I was appalled at the minimum salaries paid to the workers—rats ran through the factory and within the walls from which the smell of death emanated—and as the union contracts came up for renewal I argued for awarding considerable raises. I became a favorite of the union representative. Eventually, my father’s abysmal business sense and my socialist urgings drove the company to bankruptcy, and I was released from a form of imprisonment. I consider now with some horror that but for that failure, I might have spent the rest of my life in a business for which I had no interest and no real ability. I returned to the classroom first at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, New York, serving as a reading tutor, and then in 1974 I was hired at North High School in Great Neck on Long Island, where over the next fourteen years I engaged in different kinds of good trouble. I thought that school and learning could be both fun and socially responsible and I organized a curriculum that promoted those goals.

For me, as I have said, school had been fraught with anxiety. I had had companions but perhaps not friends. I was the outlier aspiring to belong but sensing that I would always be adjudged as falling just short. I wasn’t considered smart enough, athletic enough, politically astute enough, social enough. It was a traumatic life back then. But as now a teacher I wanted to create spaces where others need not suffer those anxious feelings. Perhaps I hoped that my students—and over the years there were many of them—would experience high school differently than I had. In my first year at Great Neck I organized an all-day Shakespeare Festival that transformed the entire school into a celebration of the Bard’s birthday. The event disrupted the normal workings of that school day. Teachers dressed as their favorite Shakespearean character: I wore a suit of inky black and for a short while I could be Hamlet, a play from which I was excluded in high school from studying because I was not deemed intelligent enough. On Shakespeare Day, while I recited Hamlet’s soliloquies (in a style I hoped that aped that of Richard Burton’s Broadway performance) and Carolee played Ophelia; and Larry in his robe and politically incorrect black face wept because soon he would murder Desdemona, the school became Elizabethan. The music department sauntered through the halls singing madrigals; the home economics department baked Elizabethan goodies. The school principal, dear Red Noyes, paraded the halls as Shakespeare himself! I recall this as a glorious day though there were not a few faculty who disapproved vociferously and refused to join the festivities.

Another time I organized an all-day Saturday festival that began with a concert of folk music offered by student musicians, that was followed by a catered fried chicken dinner. Following the meal that had been served in the school cafeteria, we moved into the gymnasium for a traditional square dance called by an authentic and well-paid professional. At another time and along with several politically active and astute students we founded and I advised the North Star, a left-wing publication of political and social comment and critique that was written and edited wholly by students. For several years I advised the school yearbook and served as sponsor for the senior class. In this latter position, I proposed a few nontraditional options for activities. As an idea for an egalitarian and affordable senior prom I offered the possibility of a lobster bake at Jones Beach rather than the traditionally extravagant affair of gowns and tuxedos, orchids, expensive restaurant dinners and all-night parties. I was overr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Starting Out
• Before the Masts
• Paths In
• Bibliography