The post I wrote yesterday is a period piece. My education and my profession were dumbied down.
I was putting myself first because I wanted this so badly. The only people I want to offend were the faculty at this school who had to do everything so politically correct.
An older man (74 then) at my field placement and in school sexually harassed me. He was past retirement age; I was younger and looked young for my age.
He was thrown out of our field placement for not being to able grasp the simplest thing, and for “counselling men not to take their meds,” and other things that should have been important.
He was allowed to come to our social work practice class without having a field placement. He would spend the first few minutes before class talking about how sexually provoking I was.
Trust me I wasn’t.
Many students offered to testify on my behalf.
Only his hearing kept on being postponed. I was supposed to understand that because he was older…..
He was a retired white professional who hated all women, and didn’t pretend otherwise.
Women were the cause of everything that had ever gone wrong in his life.
I was the only woman in the class who had been in his field placement so I became the woman who represented everything that was wrong to him.
No I didn’t understand.
His rights came before mine because he was in his 70′s.
I had never been a bitter person.
I had never been a person who could hate other people simply for existing.
I began to understand hate because of this man, and the faculty that was so into doing the right thing, that I was ignored, told by women teachers my age or younger, that this would be a defining experience of my life, and someday I would understand.
Understand what?
When I would ask for an explanation, suddenly all the rhetoric would be gone.
They kept on forgetting that they weren’t talking to an impressionable young girl.
They finally had the hearing. He was kicked out.
I have never been able to successfully explain this period of my life because I never understood it.
I will never allow anybody to come before me again. I’m tired of being so understanding, so nice
One thing that I did learn was that hate begets hate.
I refused to stay bitter or angry, but it still saddens me.
I kept this out of my post on my two years of listening to rhetoric, because it was my personal problem.
It shouldn’t have been. Once I went to the proper people in the faculty and told them that he would tell me–in front of an entire class how sexually assertive, and aggressive I was–when I wouldn’t even look at him, it should have become their problem.
But he could have sued them for age discrimination, and he told them that.
It never occurred to me to even think about suing; let alone threaten to sue.
That was probably a mistake.
I’m far from perfect. But I did everything by the book, and had actually felt sorry for him.
This incident probably colored my perception of my entire experience at school.
I expected school to be challenging but not in the way it was.
It changed my life forever. I am and was an optimist.
Nobodies life is ever always easy. I had always been a trusting person. Perhaps too trusting for a life long New Yorker. I learned not to trust.
Then came 9/11, and everything changed.
Pia, I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s the kind of experience that really shows the problem with problem with political correctness and the value of sunshine. Not sunshine like “smile!” More like, sunshine from keeping things outside where the sun shines and people can see what is happening. The evil that is done in this world is less than the damage done when the evil is cloaked or closeted by cowards who see themselves as well-intended.
Pia, I am so sorry, too. I was date-raped in my first term at college and went through the ensuing three years in a kind of haze. I even ended up in a house-share with the guy in my second year, because he was at the centre of my group of friends and I didn’t want to be an outcast. It didn’t occur to me that I could have spoken to anyone in authority about it and get it addressed. I guess I should have – but I could see how stressful it might all become, and I didn’t have the stomach for it.
“someday I would understand.
Understand what?”
That is easily the most profound thing I have heard this week. Maybe this month. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, actually.
Amazing.
How did 9/11 change your tendency to trust, Pia?
Good question. Deep somewhere in my blog are some posts about 9/11 and how it changed my life. Literally, for all the same reasons it affected everybody in New York who were fortunate enough to only know survivors; and then my mom literally dropped dead a month later.
For a long time I retreated into deep mistrust of everybody and everything, as my mom had been my moral guidepost. She kept on telling me that I had become wiser than her but she was my mom, and it was kind of her job to tell me things like that.
After a year or so, after being nasty to everybody who was trying to be good to me, I began coming out of my self-absorbed, self-pitying state, and realized that if I still wanted friends and family to care about me, I should become the person I had been before I had gone to grad school.
Sweet but strong. Atriculate and witty–all that.
Basically I decided that trust is a good attribute, as long as street smarts are retained.
Once I began trusting again I found it extremely easy to engage people; to weed out the friends who no longer contributed to my life; keep the ones who did; to give new people a chance.
I had been angry for two thirds of a decade. I’m not angry, and that shows in every aspect of my life, usually.
When I do become angry, I rant into my blog–and those could be my best or worst posts.
Dredging up the feelings I expressed in this post and the prior one was more difficult than I could have imagined. And that’s a good thing I think.
You reached inside of me and gently but decisively caught a myriad of emotions so deftly with your words.I relate so much to this, that it’s uncanny, yet “warm fuzzies”, too because I’m not alone, despite the despicable similar circumstances thorugh the decades we share. Open, well-written post. Someday, I’ll be brave enough to publically write what I need to. Thanks for the inspiration.