Unspoken Oppression – The Twin Hells of School and Work
April 16, 2025
Image by Annie Spratt.
“They schools can’t teach us shit
my people need freedom
we tryin to get all we can get”
-Dead Prez, They Schools
I was in the fourth grade the first time someone called me “cynical.” It came from an adult—a teacher at that. I’ve long forgotten whatever it was I could have said to garner such a reaction from someone who was several times my age, but that’s really beside the point, which is this: who the hell would say such a thing to a young child? And why?
I had no idea what the word meant, so I looked it up. I still didn’t understand. All that my child’s mind understood was that I’d transgressed in some way—I had disappointed a grown-up. It hurt my feelings, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to think my own thoughts in my own way. I’d like to pat that kid on the back for his resiliency in the face of obnoxiousness and cruelty.
“Pessimistic” is another word that people have often lobbed at me like a rotten tomato since I was young. At some point I decided these words were simply thoughtless insults that people brandished whenever I said something they didn’t like. If anything, it made me more determined to be myself, regardless of cost or consequences. Give that kid another pat on the back.
I find it instructive that the kind of adults who would call a child cynical are the same ones who are most devoted to the idea that the proper way to rear children is to force them to sit at a desk, doing pointless, repetitive tasks, for the best hours of the day, five days a week, nine months a year—conditioning them to obedience, fractured thinking, emotional dependency on authority, and boredom.
Anyone who has plodded through this country’s demented compulsory schooling system knows perfectly well that it’s a nightmarish violation of the human spirit. Yet most of us grow up and regard it as unavoidable, like it was gravity. We fail to imagine or pursue any alternatives. Even worse, we have kids of our own and ship them off to these chambers of low-grade torture, despite our own hellish experiences there. What’s more cynical than that?
The most naive among us are convinced that we’re doing our kids some kind of favor by sending them to school, and perhaps such ignorance can be forgiven. Other folks know through hard experience that lack of schooling credentials can doom children to a lifetime of menial labor or worse.
At best, a skillful performance at jumping through academic hoops can provide options and opportunities that we otherwise wouldn’t have… or at least, that’s how my dad sold me on completing college, when, during my first year, riddled with frustration and despair, I dearly longed to drop out and find something, anything else that might make my life worth living.
His words made sense at the time. These days I’m not so sure.
It’s true that college gave me certain opportunities. I took classes in Women’s Studies and Black Studies, struggled through a year of Japanese, learned Mandarin, and traveled to China for a summer of studying abroad. I learned that I hate computer programming with a passion (a class that concluded with the only final exam I ever cried over). I met my first Socialists™ and Activists™, dated women from foreign cultures, and went to enough frat parties to discover how much they suck. I earned my Bachelor’s degree—a prerequisite for a whole lot of jobs I have never wanted.
I think those are all great experiences for a young person to have. However, I also think that if given the necessary support and encouragement in my intellectual curiosities throughout my youth, and freed from the colonization of schooling, there is no reason I could not have had those experiences on my own… without having had to suffer through almost twenty years of institutionalization. Who knows what I might have achieved?
But who could possibly have provided such support and encouragement? My parents were busy working. Isolated in a suburban nuclear family, I had no other relatives nearby, and even if I would have, they would likewise have been busy working. I was already in college before I even heard the term homeschooling.
Some months ago I was driving out to attend a sweat-lodge ceremony with one of my lodge brothers. It has become part of the ritual for us to have political debates during the several hours we spend in the car traveling to and from ceremony. He’s an urban leftist of the Chicano/Ethnic Studies variety, and I’m an unrepentant pirate anarchist savage. Whether we agree or disagree on a given point, our worldviews—our fundamental beliefs as to what life is and should be about—differ all the way down to the bedrock.
Both of us are in our mid-to-late forties. We’re both musicians. We share a tricksterish sense of humor. We both proudly and purposely defy the mandates of Babylon Masculinity by being nurturing, compassionate, and generous. We both participate in indigenous ceremonies. We even live in the same section of East Oakland.
The similarities end there.
I grew up in the semi-rural margins of the Bay Area. He’s from the San Francisco barrio. His parents were first generation immigrants, mine were post-WWII escapees of poverty. He was a teenage criminal, I was a straight-A student. He has spent his life surrounded by family and community; I was more or less raised by television and comic books. He’s very social and loves to be around other people; I generally prefer my own company and spend a great deal of time alone. I stay up late reading books, he loses sleep watching YouTube (on a smartphone, of course).
I believe that industrial civilization is a cosmic crime; he’s never questioned it. I have zero trust or loyalty for any bureaucratic institution; he’s spent most of his adult life working for non-profits and unions. I am enthusiastically child-free, have never married, and in fact I have spent very little time even being monogamous; he’s been married, divorced, shares custody of two young daughters, and continues to believe that one day he’ll find his True Love. He has a Career™ and works fifty-plus hours a week, sometimes six days a week; I work two days a week as a thug-for-hire, teach a few kungfu classes, and spend most of my remaining time drinking, smoking, writing, fucking, having conversations, making art, and lounging around.
I may suffer from any number of emotional maladies, but guilt is not one of them. He is riddled with it; he has a martyr’s conviction that we should all be Saving the World, while I think it’s far, far too late for that. He thinks science & technology will solve the problems that science & technology have created, a notion I find patently absurd. He likes to talk about the importance of “democracy”; I like to stink up the room by pointing out that democracy was invented by a society that, at the pinnacle of its dubious glory, had a slave-to-free-man ratio of 3 to 1.
During our most recent debate, my lodge brother initiated himself into the well-populated cabal of people who have described my views as “pessimistic.” As an adult I still don’t understand what these folks mean any better than I did as a child. I think about it like this: if the weather forecast on Monday says it’s going to be sunny through Friday, and the weather remains sunny through Thursday, but on Thursday night I’m complaining about how it’ll probably rain the next day… that’s pessimism.
On the other hand, if I point out that the driver-less, brake-less, inescapable train rocketing toward the cliff is probably going to kill all of its passengers, that ain’t pessimism, it’s a reasonable assessment of the facts at hand! Anyone who’s devoted any time at all to researching the consequences of industrial civilization has most definitely seen the cliff; if they’ve put serious time in, they’ve probably seen the train, too. They might have even tried to find a way off it (spoiler alert: there’s no way off).
During the same conversation, my lodge brother also dropped a quote on me that I’ve heard many times (usually from corny leftists) but could not immediately identify; I later found out it was from Malcolm X: “We are not responsible for our oppression, but we are responsible for our liberation.”
Brother Malcolm is always good for a saucy line, but here, as usual, it’s taken way out of context, particularly historical context. Mister X was murdered long before the chickens started coming home to roost—the crisis of global warming, the cybernetic mind control, the forever wars, the resurgent fascism, the utter triumph of global capitalism and industrial militarism.
As a writer and a poet, I love and respect language, words, and depth of meaning. I hate platitudes; I hate mindlessly parroted political jargon even more. So whenever someone bops me with some lexicon like they just won the conversation, it’s time for me to play Naughty Student, hand up in the back of the room—excuse me, sir; define oppression; define liberation. Define responsible.
In my view, the most common and unacknowledged forms of immediate, everyday oppression are the twin hells of School & Work. The first was always intended by its progenitors as training for the second; some asshole authority figure tells you what to do all day, and the most important lesson you learn is: do it or else. Coerced by law, and by the need for parents to have somewhere to park their kids during the workday, we go to school. Coerced by the necessity of money for survival, we work… if we’re lucky. Otherwise, we end up in society’s trash can, living on the street or in prison.
Coercion and domination wound the spirit and retard the mind; they humiliate us, preempting or crushing our self-respect. School & Work are tools of the powerful few to exploit the many—not only through the profits these tools generate, but also by their effectiveness at producing a compliant, obedient population of dimwitted consumers—a drone class, rendered incapable of critical or imaginative thought, ignorant, short of memory and attention spans, and, these days, hopelessly addicted to screens.
How could such a population even imagine liberation, let alone achieve it?
Now that I’m swimming through the ocean of aches, pains, and melancholy that is middle-age, I’ve been reflecting on the child I was, and on how he turned into me. I’ve realized that from my earliest years, the one thing I’ve desired more than anything else is for my time to belong to me. Not to a teacher. Not to a boss. Certainly not to an institution (Outlaw Rule Number One: get away with it).
In my early twenties, thanks to the writings of a few anarchist cranks and belligerent savages, I discovered that I was not alone in my desire, and that it was possible to achieve. They gave me knowledge, wisdom, and concepts to frame my own resistance, my liberation. It took a while, but I finally achieved this desire; the majority of my time is now my own. My freedom may be small and personal, but it’s mine, and it works—I will keep and defend it by any means necessary.
There is no escape from the Machine… but that doesn’t mean we have to live entirely on its terms.
I’ve been bored with refuting the silly authoritarian bullshit of wannabe revolutionaries and Marx-jockeys for twenty years now, but having a laugh at their expense never gets old. Someday I’ll ask my lodge brother what his vision of an ideal society is, for the sole purpose of ridiculing it later—whatever his response is, it’s guaranteed to provide me with an entertaining anecdote to tell my elderly, retired parents.
After spending most of their lives selling their time for the profit of others, I’d say they’ve earned the laughs.
