The Sky is Falling

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

The six-week session of the Utah Legislature opens next week. When I was young, it never occurred to me that my far-from-influential, middle-class voice mattered.  All that changed in 1977 when I, along with several thousand other LDS women, flooded the International Woman’s Year conference held in Salt Lake City. My friends and I decided this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity to join with other women from around the world and really shine some light on shared threats to women and their families.

The half dozen of the women from my neighborhood and I had studied the agenda and divided up the sessions so that we all had a chance to attend the discussions which interested us most. One of my choices was the invasive spread of pornography which was threatening family bonds the world over. Maybe 30 to 40 women in this smaller session listened carefully to information and statistics about how the corrosive nature of pornography was undermining families—not just emotionally, but economically as well. From the discussion, it was pretty clear that no matter where we came from, at some level all of us were opposed to insidious effects of pornography. Next we were tasked with creating a resolution which expressed our majority view and presenting it for adoption by the full assembly of the conference.

I was shocked when the resolution we had so carefully crafted was voted down. Later I discovered that rather than listen to the actual language of the resolution, many local women believed a rapidly spreading but unfounded rumor that all resolutions proposed by this international assembly were designed to destroy traditional families, so they arbitrarily voted “no” without even bothering to read the texts of individual resolutions. Most of them had no idea that their negative vote on our committee’s proposal signaled their actual support of pornography! That was the day I learned that if I wasn’t paying attention, someone else’s voice obliterated my opinion.

Then one morning maybe twenty or so years later, I was standing in my classroom talking to my students when we heard a sort of tearing or ripping noise above us. Without any additional warning, a whole section of the ceiling groaned, then twisted and cracked, tumbling chunks of construction material onto the floor around us. We were fortunate on two counts:  (1) the rubble turned out to cover an area only about eight feet long and two feet wide, and (2) it came crashing down right between where I was standing and the rows of students in front of me. For a moment, there was a stunned silence. A couple of enterprising young men rushed forward to start clearing out the pieces of ceiling tile and tangled metallic framework that was supposed to have been holding the whole thing together, but I stopped them. Who knew if the rest of the tiles were on the verge of joining their comrades, thereby injuring my students as they fell?

“Wait.” I ordered. “How long do you think those ceiling tiles have been covered with stains from water damage seeping in every time it rains–or in this week’s case—snows?”

My class considered that. “As long as I’ve been at Bingham,” one of them said.

“It’s worse in a couple of my other classrooms,” another pointed out.       

“Just leave it. Stay away from the mess,” I told the eager beavers who had leaped up to help. I spent a couple of minutes trying to determine if there was likely to be more debris dropping any time in the near future. If I’d hadn’t been so naïve, I would have immediately evacuated my classroom, but in my defense, I’d never been confronted with the ceiling caving in before. “Move your desks back to the edges of the room (where I surmised the ceiling structure was more robust because there were no water stains on those rows near the outside walls) and work on that assignment I just gave you. I’ll go down and alert the office.” (In those days, teachers had no way to call out in case of emergencies. We could never have imagined then the kinds of dangers schools would be subject to in the future.)

I went straight downstairs, opened the main office door, and announced in what I hoped was a voice of doom, “The Sky is Falling!” A half dozen secretaries didn’t even bother to look.

“Hey!  Really! The sky is falling!” Still no response. The principal’s office was off to my left directly in front of me. His door was open, so I walked over and announced, “The sky is falling.” He looked up. He thought I was kidding, too.

To be fair, I’m sure none of them had any idea of the condition of the roof over the English department. But the humanities teacher down the hall had gotten so tired of having to empty the buckets he put under the drips from the ceiling in his classroom that snowy winter, he bought an old eagle-clawed bathtub at an antique store, had his students help him drag it off the elevator, through the long hall, and position it under half a dozen leaks. A couple of months later, when the bathtub was full of the seeping water, some of his students bought goldfish to add to the artificial pond. They even took turns feeding the fish regularly. (I’m not making this up.)

Once I convinced the administration there was a legitimate emergency in my classroom, our excellent custodial team jumped into action, tackling the mess and replacing all the water damaged tiles (which turned out to be most of them). I didn’t know at the time that the every school roof was regularly inspected and repaired on a rotation basis. But replacing a whole high school roof required a vote of the local school board–whose job was mainly policy and finance.

No one was more surprised than I was the night several years later when I woke up at 2 AM with the clear conviction that once I retired the following summer, I needed to run for an elected position on that local school board. It was enormously satisfying the day I was able to help convince my fellow board members to add the new roof for my former workplace to the annual budget—no small decision as it involved a considerable chunk of the district maintenance allocation.

It’s taken more than the 40 years, but here’s a secret I finally understand: ordinary people who care about their families, their neighbors, and their communities have the power to effect change. During this legislative session, don’t let rumor, popular opinion, or simply disinterest stifle your voice. Speak up; speak kindly; speak truth. We’ll all be better for it.