Zombies

My junior year of high school, I took what must have been some sort of debate or perhaps a speech class. I obviously don’t remember that much about it, but it mostly consisted of a bunch of racist seniors justifying their racism while the teacher, a German foreign-exchange student and myself argued against them. I challenged that their arguments were simply repetitions of what they had been told, at the same time realizing that everything I said were simply repetitions of what I had been told. The German kid (my apologies, but I have no idea what his name was) brought a unique perspective in that he came from a country where things like racist groups were illegal. He was repeating what he had been told as well. I remember at the time naively thinking that that also must be wrong because that’s not the way we did it in America.

The German kid was an urban gothic-dressed angst-ridden foreigner who had been dropped into a tiny Midwest conservative farming all-American town. In my high school, the majority wore plaid flannel shirts, huge belt buckles, cowboy boots and chewed tobacco. Except for one black teacher, you'd have to travel to Des Moines to find someone who wasn't white. Needless to say, the German kid didn’t fit in too well in my high school. Fortunately neither did I, so I spent some time hanging out with him and the other exchange students (which also included two Japanese kids and a Hispanic who would end up living with my family for most of the school year).

One day, it must have been September or October of 1992, I gave the German kid a ride into Ankeny to get our hair cut at the only barbershop within a 20 mile radius of where we went to school. Cecil the barber, like many people in Iowa, was an avid fisherman and hunter, and had fish and animals mounted all over his shop. Cecil cut everyone’s hair the exact same way, so every male in my school district had the exact same haircut, except for the few "rebels" who didn’t get their hair cut at all.

As we drove to Cecil’s in my Volkswagon Bug, I nervously flipped through the radio stations. I didn’t really usually listen to music, but I also couldn’t think of anything to say to the kid and was trying to break the silence. Finally, I came upon a song that the girl I had just started dating liked. In fact, it was "our song" for whatever random reason. Honestly, I’d never paid any attention to it, but I knew it was popular at the time so I assumed it was good. The song was "When I Look Into Your Eyes," by Firehouse.

Immediately, the kid groaned and declared what a horrible song it was. I innocently asked, "Why?" and he proceeded to go into a diatribe about music for the rest of the trip. I had no idea what or who he was talking about. I had never really listened to music except for the Christian stuff I had grown up with. We didn’t have cable, so I had never seen MTV. Pretty much all I knew about secular music was whatever rock band t-shirts the other kids wore. The darndest thing about this fact was that I had spent about an hour a day banging on a drumset since I had gotten one in sixth grade!

I realized that, as a so-called drummer, I should learn about music. But in order to do so, I would have to learn to form my own opinions first. My whole life I had been surrounded by a bunch of zombies who simply did what everybody else did and believed what they were told, and I was one of them. I also realized that different opinions, such as those of the German kid, were as useless to me as the opinions I had grown up believing. No opinion was worthwhile unless I could understand from whence it had been derived, and then scrutinize the conclusions beginning from the origin of the question. (Years later as a philosophy major, I would find out this method is called "radical skepticism.") I would have to become acutely aware of my own sensory and mental perceptions in order to recognize my own tastes and preferences.

Suddenly, I got disoriented. I couldn’t remember which road I was on or which way to turn to get to where I was going. I had driven this same route to the same barbershop for years, but all of a sudden I didn’t know where I was. Or perhaps, for the first time in my life, I simply realized I didn’t know where I was; a fact of my entire existence up until now.