Organization

(Judy Wallen) As I grew up in a California suburb that was largely colonized in the latter half of the 20th century with the hope of many upwardly mobile young families, I am often reminded by fellow Californians of my good fortune in spending those years between cradle and teenage wasteland nourished and sheltered by privilege.  Up until high school, I even had the rare benefit of experiencing pre–Proposition 13 California public schools, a Golden Age of Education rivaling Athens, the Renaissance, or Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Self-Love.  When I confess how I have trouble remembering what or if I learned much of anything during this utopian period, the wistfulness of the young Californian liberals turns to disappointment, disbelief, and rage.  Yet cancel culture’s recent occupation of our zeitgeist has given me a renewed appreciation of the advanced multi-year curriculum that I received during that time when occupants saturated the school with the insatiable primal energy of the id while adults were not looking.  Almost all I really needed to know about witch-hunting I learned in middle school.