Give peace a chance
I was a child in the 1980s and don’t remember the politics of the time. Ronald Reagan to me was an amusing rubber mask in a rock video, and the man and the mask emoted in remarkably similar fashion.
My consciousness of the greater world deepened at the age of twelve when my country, for reasons still not clear to me, invaded Iraq. I took the war as a personal blow. The war? We were at war? People were going to die? The Gulf War devastated me. I didn’t realize my country had always been involved in lesser wars, and for whatever reason Uncle Sam decided to give this one more fanfare than usual.
I remember sitting in front of the the television by myself because the adults of my world really didn’t care what was going on, or didn’t seem to. Maybe they heard about it on the radio earlier and didn’t need to see the news. It seemed like I was the only one who felt upset about the war in my house, and no one wanted to talk about it. Great washes of tears streamed down my face as I watched the war unfold, and saw footage of ‘smart bombs’ and of men dressed in desert-toned camouflage in desert-toned tanks, carrying machine guns. We were never shown pictures of ‘the enemy.’ No human faces, just buildings with smart bombs.
I wanted to tie a yellow ribbon around the tree in our yard, though my mom wasn’t into the idea. She seemed to think it overly sentimental. It is possible I was a little overly sentimental, and definitely earnest. I had discovered John Lennon, just before the war, and listened to the Imagine album over and over in my room. With tears streaming down my face I wrote in a journal, ‘How can we have war after we’ve had John Lennon?’ He was a kind of Jesus figure to me, as the only public figure I knew of who wanted people to lay down their guns, and stop hurting each other. I thought his message rang through loud and clear. Hadn’t everyone else heard it?
An art contest was announced in my school, with the theme of Peace on Earth to coincide with the war. I knew right away what I was going to do. I found a photo of John Lennon and drew from it. I wrote the word PEACE in cloud-like block letters behind him, and in smaller print of varying sizes, I filled the sky with the words ‘no death, no wars, no countries, no religion’ etc. The idea of this graphic is facile, and I would reject doing it now, but at the time it seemed poignant.
One of the judges for the art contest was a mother of a girl in my school, the kind of PTA mom who was always around, and always involved. She was a familiar face on our childhood landscape. I knew she was a very conservative Mormon because I had been to their house to play, and had felt so restricted I didn’t dare move an elbow. She was one of the five judges along with the school art teacher, whom I had never met, another PTA mom, someone from the school district, and our Vice Principal.
Among PTA moms, she was the Alpha Mom. The other PTA moms deferred to her for book fairs or other events, or while chaperoning our trips to the pool, or to the state fair. The Alpha PTA Mom approached me after the contest winners were announced; in first place, a stick figure drawing another girl had made of herself on top of a blue and green crayon Earth, with her arms held wide for a hug, and hearts all around her. I don’t remember what the other placed pictures were. I stopped paying attention after my name wasn’t called because the picture that won was a stick figure drawing, and I had drawn a realistic, shaded John Lennon with a graphic/word cloud, which was a sophisticated design for a twelve-year old with no formal art training. I felt sick about it. I was given an ‘Honorable Mention’ nod, but I was a very poor loser. I slunked away from the auditorium with my drawing in my hand. This is when the PTA mom approached me. She put her arm around me in the variety of side-hug known as the ‘teacher hug’ and said, “I’m not a fan of John Lennon, but that was a nice drawing you did. I’m afraid it didn’t illustrate the meaning of Peace on Earth, though. Next time, you ought to draw for the theme.”
It’s hard to know if my judgment of what she said was based on bitterness, or on something I sensed in her tone. At the time, I heard an underlying message in what she said. She didn’t like John Lennon, and she rejected his vision of how to achieve peace on Earth. I guessed she had held sway over the other judges. This was confirmed when the art teacher sidled up to me in line in the cafeteria. I moved aside, because we were supposed to let the teachers jump in line, and I thought that was what she was doing, but she didn’t even have a tray in her hands. She said, “Your drawing was very well done. You ought to sign up for one of my classes.” I mumbled something like thank you, but no, and she gave me an apologetic smile. “If it were up to me, your drawing would have won.” She said if I changed my mind, it would be easy to swap a class for art. After she left the cafeteria, we never spoke again.
Even though the art teacher had said my drawing won in her eyes, it was no consolation. I felt alienated, though I wasn’t sure why.
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