The Old Blog in the Desert

I have lived long enough to learn that history is not always made by generals, presidents, or philosophers, but sometimes by youngsters with t-shirts.

Forty-seven years ago, while stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, where the wind has been in a foul temper since statehood, I made a pilgrimage down to the Air Force Academy. I went for the inspiration and came home with two red t-shirts and a constitutional crisis.

The shirts were handsome in a defiant sort of way. Upon the chest stood Mr. Mickey Mouse himself, that ambassador of American cheerfulness, performing a gesture not commonly found in children’s storybooks.

Below him were words addressed to the nation of Iran in a tone not to be mistaken for a Valentine’s greeting. It was a product of its time. The late 1970s were not an era inclined toward subtlety.

I bought two. One for Adam, one for me. A man should never go into battle without proper uniformity.

Adam, being young and therefore fearless, wore his to high school. The faculty, being older and therefore terrified, objected. They informed him that while they encouraged free thought, they preferred it in something less expressive.

They demanded he remove the shirt. Adam declined, proving that stubbornness is often the first visible symptom of adulthood.

For this act of textile treason, Adam found himself suspended.

Now, I have always held that if a government may send a man to defend liberty abroad, it ought not tremble when a boy practices a little of it at home. So, I did what any calm and reasonable enlisted man would do: I put on my uniform and went to the school board meeting.

There is no garment quite so persuasive as a military uniform worn in a room full of nervous administrators. It suggests sacrifice, discipline, and paperwork.

I accused the high school of trampling my brother’s free speech. I did so politely, because politeness delivered in a firm tone is more unsettling than shouting.

Of the assembled guardians of youth, only Jack McKellar and Larry Beam agreed with us. The rest looked as though they had swallowed a lemon whole and were waiting for it to apologize.

They spoke gravely about order, decorum, and the impressionable nature of children, as though adolescence were a fragile vase. In the end, we lost the right to parade Mickey through the hallways.

The shirt was banished, and civilization saved.

But the two-day suspension vanished from Adam’s record, erased so thoroughly that future historians will have to rely on family storytelling to know the rebellion ever occurred.

In my experience, when the record goes away and the lesson remains, that qualifies as a victory.

And I can hardly believe it has been forty-seven years. The shirt is gone, and Adam is gone, too.

The shirt would hang in a place of honor now, a picture of my brother next to it, framed not for its artwork, which was enthusiastic rather than refined, but for what it represented: a moment when a boy decided not to change his clothes, and a young adult decided not to change his principles.

Empires rise and fall, and fashions come and go, but school boards remain eternally anxious. And somewhere in the great ledger of American absurdities, there will always be an entry noting that a red t-shirt once rattled a schoolhouse, and that two men remembered what the First Amendment was for.