“Persistence, opportunism, even a bit of youthful, unearned cockiness — if I’m honest, I owe a lot to these things. Do they really have no value for my sons?”
From the series “Consolation,” by photographer Achim Lippoth, an examination of family life and emotional moments within families. Photo: Achim Lippoth Sometime around 1987, my father tried to teach me how to shoot a gun.
At least I think this is what he said: My ears were still screaming. Neither one of us ever fired a gun again. The thing is, as we know, we do not live in a context-less world; this is a zero-sum game. And that aggressiveness and entitlement — the positive advice to children to be whatever they want, weaponized over the generations — has to come at a cost, someone else’s cost. The power white American boys have been taught to seize for generations comes from the already powerless, women, people of color, everyone who isn’t us.
But mostly we are here to raise our boys. Athens is a place where our boys can be boys, where they run around like idiots, where they can play Little League baseball, where they can ride bicycles down empty streets not realizing that we’ve taken our hand off the seat and they’re actually pedaling on their own. They can stretch their arms, they can run around like crazy, they can make stupid mistakes without hurting that many people. They can … be aggressive, snot-nosed, messy little boys.
But this lesson of self-reliance is not only an illusion, it brings with it its own privilege. I can tell myself that any “success” I’ve had has been because of “hard work” and “perseverance,” but I’m kidding myself. I’m a middle-class white kid who was encouraged to go his own way, to be his own person, in a way nobody even bothered to question; being America’s default on the form meant I was never expected to stand in or up for anything other than myself.
The teacher, though, had plenty to say, and much of it was full of the sort of details every parent dreams of hearing. William was one of her brightest students, reading at a third-grade level already, and he’s diligent and patient and “picks the right friends.” The only struggle she’d had with him was keeping him challenged: “He’s so far ahead of almost everybody else that I sometimes worry he’s bored.
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