And I thought about myself back in Baltimore and what I was being trained for. I was saved by the books in my house, by the implicit message that learning does not belong exclusively in schools. Who would I be, left to the devices of those who seek to shrink education, to make it orderly and pliable? I don’t know. But I know what I would not be: a writer. The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.
