You Don’t Run Things Around Here
Forget your place at your own peril.
By Gina Arnold
Dominique looked at the gold letters — I Do — on the delicate white bow.
“What does that name mean?” she asked.
“It’s an answer,” said Wynand, “to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in childhood was ‘You don’t run things around here.’”
— The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (page 460)
The atmosphere of Brewster High School is corroding. It may have started out innocently enough — a dismissive glance here, a snarky comment there — but now full blown contempt between teacher and student is palpable. Cynicism sticks to the walls and sarcasm drips from the ceiling. Impertinence, an invisible, noxious gas, wafts through our classrooms. We breathe it in mindlessly, forgetting that it’s even there. What harm can it really do? You don’t think for one second that living in an environment of disrespect can warp who you are.
But it can. It will.
Within the first quarter of this school year, students committed a number of outrageous acts of disrespect. Students resisted the SRO, openly called a teacher’s idea stupid and proceeded to argue for nearly five minutes in front of a rather large group… Someone even flipped off a faculty member.
These events may shock us when we hear about them, or when we see them unfold like a car crash before our eyes — so horrifying you can’t look away — but the everyday insolence that has wormed its way into how students relate to figures of authority is just as disturbing. Students can roll their eyes at teachers, refer to them by their first names behind their backs, talk to them with unwarranted sarcasm, offer unwanted criticism, and be generally belligerent with little to no consequence. Is it really any surprise then, when some of the more extreme cases occur? We have come to believe we are invincible.
But, of course, we aren’t invulnerable to the consequences of our actions. We never have been and we never will be. In the real world, mouthing off to your employer will get you fired. For every insolent statement, contemptuous look, sarcastic undertone, there is a repercussion. It may not be immediate, but trust me, how others (often times important others) perceive you has been distorted.
To avoid slipping into the dangerous habit of disrespect toward authority, we must identify why we rationalize impertinence to ourselves. I’ve found two reasons driving this “culture of insolence” in our school. The primary reason is straightforward — the perception of incompetence leads us to believe that we have the right to withhold the proper respect for authority.
This brings me back to the title of this piece and the story of Gail Wynand. In The Fountainhead, Wynand is a supporting character who represents the rags-to-riches story. He is born into poverty around the early 20th century in New York City. In order to get by he takes up a number of odd jobs as a child and young adult until his eventual success. One experience he had was working in a grocery store:
He worked in a grocery store. He ran errands, he swept the soggy wooden floor, he sorted out barrels of rotting vegetables, he helped wait on customers, patiently weighing a pound of flour or filling a pitcher with milk from a huge can. It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it. One day, he explained to the grocer what a good idea it would be to put milk in bottles, like whisky. “You shut your trap and go wait on Mrs. Sullivan there,” said the grocer, “don’t you tell me nothing I don’t know about my business. You don’t run things around here.” He waited on Mrs. Sullivan and said nothing. [Emphasis added.]
— The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (page 417)
Wynand learned something essential to his later success in his youth. If he ever hoped to be able to say “I do run things around here,” then he would have to bow his head for now. He must bide his time. He must wait. He learned to swallow his pride even when he had to take orders from the inept. Wynand decided to show the utmost respect for his superiors even when he did not have a feeling of deep admiration for them elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements — he was respectful even when that respect was not genuinely felt.
After years of obediently kowtowing, after decades of paying careful attention to his place, Wynand was finally able to say “I do.” The same is true for anyone.
We are lucky enough to go to a high school where the vast majority of teachers are competent. In nearly all cases, we should feel genuine respect for them. If we are in a class with a teacher who we believe to be incompetent we must do two things: consider the fact that we may be wrong and show absolutely no sign of our lack of respect.
Remember that no matter how much you may want to, you don’t run things around here.
Now to the more counterintuitive, though just as dangerous, reason why we may say something or act in a way that is out-of-line. Sometimes we are impertinent to a teacher that we do respect. We respect and like them so much that we are annoyed, if only subliminally, by the student-teacher boundary that exists and our own status as an “inferior.” Instead of being a student and a teacher, an inferior and a superior, we just want to be two people. We want to be two equals.
Rationally, we know that this can never really happen. We will always be subordinate in relation to teachers. But our subconscious minds are not bound by this truth. So if we do not think before we speak, we may find that we are not showing the proper respect for an authority figure. We are trying to keep ourselves from feeling like the inferior by talking to these teachers as if we are equal to them. Though it may lack the malicious intent behind open disrespect, it’s still unacceptable.
The root of insolence is lazy thinking. When we don’t think about the implications of what we say and do, both short-term and long-term, then we are ignorant to the very real consequences of our choices. When we don’t depend on reason, when we cling to entitlement and scream that we have a “right to our opinion” and “it’s a free country after all”, we condemn ourselves. We chip away at our own character. We engineer our own demise.
Embrace humility. Know that, for now, you are just a teenager, just a student. If you ever want to be able to declare “I do run things around here,” or paint it, in gold, on the side of your hard earned yacht, then you must learn when to stand and when to kneel. You must accept the fact that you don’t run things around here.
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