Reply #88: Once I was in a language class. [View All]

It consisted largely of reading newspapers and giving reports in the target language. The teacher was an immigrant from a country where the language was spoken; he spoke excellent English, since that was one of his majors--not by choice, his other major was the national language. They allowed him to attend the classes for his other major, but there was no doubt where he would be assigned upon graduation.

He'd get into fights with people who claimed that his knowledge of his home country for 40 years was defective. It was great there; he was bitter, and wasn't a reliable witness. Fortunately the people that argued with him dwindled to a small number of students and socialists; fights in the classroom were unseemly. He loved his country, but hated the government.

My class occurred when massive changes were taking place in the country. The teacher would sometimes charge to the front of the room and rip the photocopied news articles from the student's hands, lecture us on the *real* news behind what was being reported (frequently not that the event occurred, but that the article occurred).

Only once did he cry. The student was discussing a report in the country's main newspaper ... dealing with suicide rates. The teacher leaped to the front of the room, read the article, and delivered his lecture on why the article was important. He said he knew the changes were real and substantive. He sat down in the corner and sobbed; a close relative of his died in a "car accident" by slitting his wrists in the bathtub, and the family was threatened if they said what had happened to him, and they would lose his pension.

You see, until then, for decades, the rather large country had no reported suicides. Zip. You see, only unhappy or mentally ill people committed suicide, and in the perfect political system with the perfect health care system, there could be no unhappy people. Therefore my teacher's relative simply could not have committed suicide.